The French telephone numbering plan is used in Metropolitan France, French overseas departments and some overseas collectivities. France uses a ten-digit closed numbering plan, where the first two digits denote a geographic area, mobile or non-geographic number. 01 02 Northwest France 03 Northeast France 04 Southeast France 05 Southwest France 06 Mobile phone services 07 Mobile phone services 08 Special phone numbers: Freephone () and shared-cost services. 09 Non-geographic number (used by Voice over IP services) All geographic numbers are dialed in the ten-digit format, even for local calls. The international access code is the International Telecommunication Union's recommended 00. When calling France from abroad, the leading zero should be omitted: for example, to call a number in Southwest France, one would dial +33 5 xx xx xx xx. French people usually state phone numbers as a sequence of five double-digit numbers, e.g., 0x xx xx xx xx (and not, for example, 0 xxx-xxx-xxx or 0xxx-xx-xxxx or 0xx-xxx-xxxx). History For many years, French subscribers' telephone numbers consisted of eight digits (including the one-digit area code 1 for all of Paris and its surrounding departments, or a two-digit area code from 20 to 99 for other metropolitan departments; this area code was dialed only after the trunk code 16). The territories of Overseas France all had their own local numbering plans and used their own country codes but no area codes, and calls between different territories or Metropolitan France required a dialing international call using the international call prefix 19 followed by the country code, area code, and subscriber number. But that system began to run out of numbers in the 1980s, leading to the adoption of a new "eight-digit" numbering plan on 25 October 1985. On that date, France changed to a system of two zones, one for Paris and the surrounding Île-de-France and another for the other departments. Outside Paris, the old area code was incorporated into the subscriber's eight-digit number; for Paris, the area code 1 was retained, and a 4 was prefixed to seven-digit numbers, meaning that a subscriber's number could begin with 40, for example 4056 1873, with the trunk prefix 16 required for calls from the rest of France. For numbers in the Île-de-France surrounding Paris, the old codes 3x and 6x joined the old seven-digit numbers to become eight-digit numbers and were assigned to the Paris area code 1. To call the rest of