Phone number standards -a mess ?

[rog555]

Most of the time its easy to tell a person what your phone number is.

You meet a girl in thailand and give her your thai mobile number.  Easy.  She understands and it works. 

(Even better give her your Line-ID, or FB name, which is a bit more confusing, but often works out.)

But once you go to global use of your mobile number, things get weird.

Your thai number is : +66 (0) 123456789.

Or is it: 0066123456789.

Or it 66123456789.

There's an E.164 standard.  But doesnt include country codes  ???

I raise this issue because banks now want to send you an SMS as a 2 part verification mechanism.   But one of my foreign-non thai banks is unable to send me an SMS.   Their system has a bug with foreign phone numbers.

And booking a plane ticket often fails when they try to validate your 'foreign' phone number.

 

Its a mess !

[LASportsNut]

If I am giving my US number to a Thai or my Thai number to someone in the US, 

I just give them the long number and let them figure it out.

For Example (fake numbers):

• USA +1-323-345-6789
• Thailand +66 6-3456-7890

Edited October 5, 2022 by LASportsNut

[Revanchist]

41 minutes ago, rog555 said:

Or it 66123456789

+66123456789 another option. It's actually how WhatsApp format's numbers.

+66.123456789 still another option.

[Phoenix Dave]

I keep my US number active through Google Fi, in my iPhone 13 which has dual sim capability. Only $20 per month, plus calls, use AIS for Thai number and data. Important to keep calls to a minimum, they can get pricy. Easy for family to reach me, and after 1 1/2 years in LOS I still have the same US number. 
 

[petehoax]

i don't see how it's confusing. 

if you use an international country code, you can remove the leading 0. so instead of 091 xxx xx xx you can use 0066 91 xxx xx xx

as soon as you want to call someone in a different country, you must use the international country code. 

and for country code you can either use 0066 or +66, they are identical (for i guess 99.9% of cases). so 001 is the same as +1 (for the US) and so on.

if your bank has a problem with international phone numbers, that's their problem and it's up to them to solve it. has nothing to do with country codes being confusing. 

btw: sms as a 2factor authentification method is shit anyway and it's unfortunate that US banks are still sooooo far behind the times with this, i really don't get why this is the case. but that's a completely separate discussion.

if you still have a sim card from your home country, just use that phone number for banking and either use a phone that has 2 sim card slots or pop in the sim card if you need to receive a text message from your home country. and then switch back to thai sim card again. 

[rog555]

9 hours ago, petehoax said:

 

if your bank has a problem with international phone numbers, that's their problem and it's up to them to solve it. has nothing to do with country codes being confusing. 

btw: sms as a 2factor authentification method is shit anyway ....

You are correct,  its my bank's programmers that have failed to write software that handles sending sms messages to phone numbers correctly.   

The methods for writing down an international number are pretty clear, if more numerous than necessary.

Have you had problems booking airline tickets and entering your mobile phone number ?  Both Bangkok Air and Emirates have had bugs in the recent past causing their systems to say a phone number I enter is invalid.