Country Code: +506 International Call Prefix: 00 Number plan type: closed As of 2010 the government body in charge of allocations is the Superintendencia de Telecomunicaciones SUTEL.
The Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad, which at that time had the monopoly on telecommunications, introduced a system in which the telephone numbers in every province were assigned a prefix to make them 7 digits long.
However, the boom of mobile phone customers since the introduction of GSM around 2000 and the expansion of metropolitan areas caused a serious shortage of available numbers.
Also, all calls dialed using the old 7-digit version of the phone number are automatically redirected to a voice message with information about the change.
In 2010, after the end of the government monopoly in telecommunications, prefixes 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 were assigned to private operators.