+888

United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) assigned the E.164 geographic country code +888 for used by UN emergency responders

“The +888 number range has been allocated to OCHA for the purpose of facilitating the provision of an international system of naming and addressing for terminals involved in disaster relief activities in an area of a country that has been cut off from the national telecommunications system of that country until such time as normal telecommunications can be restored. The use of these numbering resources will therefore be relatively short-lived and the resource may be re-used at a later date for another location.”

Jeff - VoipDIY.com, “United Nations OCHA Teams-up With Voxbone to Facilitate Disaster Relief Communications on the iNum +883/+888 Network” , 24 October 2012

Transcript

[slide439] But in addition, we've seen the use for some other purposes, and one of the recent changes has been the introduction of the new country code, 888. And it was assigned to the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. And the idea is that this is a block of numbers which the UN can use to allocate numbers for emergencies. So, for example, Ericsson and several other telecom vendors have produced containerized systems containing everything that you need to basically deploy a new wireless communications infrastructure in the event of an emergency. And so they can basically air freight this in, drop it into place, backhaul via satellite, deploy local wireless services both using macrocellular and wireless LAN facilities in the event of a disaster. But one of the problems they had was, how could they get phone numbers? Because phone numbers were a resource that were allocated locally by national authorities. But in the event of a disaster, that's one of the things that often is not functioning. So we now have the introduction of a number space where the UN can allocate those numbers independently of a national telecoms authority.