Many smaller town or rural area calling implied using manual commutation circuits operated by humans.

Outside county dialing required a national access code 0 (01-xxx-xxxx to Bucharest and 0pp-xxx-xxx for the rest of the country).

In-county calling could be done without prefixes at all (xxx-xxxx to Bucharest and xxx-xxx for the rest of the country).

Each town or county has its own special services, callable with the same number throughout the country.

The first mobile company was Telemobil (an ancestor of Zapp) and it started its service in 1993 using the analogue NMT technology.

Somewhere around 1998, Telemobil changed its technology to Low Emission Mobile System (LEMS) and operated under the brand name SunTel.

The service has proven ineffective and has been changed to the current technology used under the name Zapp Mobile.

Afterwards, Connex also got 91 and 93 area codes, Dialog got 95 and 90, the newly founded Zapp Mobile got 98, and Cosmorom 96.

At the same time, no-charge numbers were allocated to special prefixes or to the Bucharest area code, looking like 01800-xxxx .

Under a special agreement, even before this reform, foreign operators could be reached at various numbers, usually in the prefix 800 (AT&T used 01800-1800).

One of the most popular premium rate numbering class was (01)8989-xxx, mostly used for media services and TV games.

Even today there still are local numbers starting with 89, but only for internet dial-up, and they are migrating to the new prefix 0870.

Usually mobile phone users and abroad callers could not and cannot access no-charge or extra-charge numbers.

In the last years, landline usage started to drop within Romania, as the mobile phones market was growing fast[when?].

Also, as the imminent accession to the EU was going to cause the state-owned company to lose its landline monopoly, a reform was introduced in 2002.

Because these area codes are shared between more companies, the entire number must be dialed, even within the same network.

Currently these numbers are sometimes used for premium rate or normal Internet dial-up services.

Each town or county has its own special services, like firefighters, police, with the same number.

Unlike for Bucharest, other regions use short numbers with 3 digits only, including the leading 9.

These services are provided by Romtelecom, therefore the area code must be dialed before the number when calling from other network.