People usually assume that making a call to a number with the same area code is considered a local call. This is not true. In telephony, the definition of a local call is one that’s within its local calling area. In reality, there is no clear way to tell whether two numbers are within the same local calling area or not.
To purchase a Twilio phone number that’s local to your customers, we recommend the following:
- When purchasing a number from Twilio, try looking for a phone number with not only the same area code but also the same prefix (the three digits after the area code). Then confirm that the geographic information listed under the phone number of your choice matches your desired local area.
- For destinations in the US and Canada, we offer additional refinement parameters allowing you to search for Twilio phone numbers in the same state/province, city, local area, city, rate center, zip code, or even general vicinity. For full details on how to refine your search with these parameters, please see AvailablePhoneNumbers Local List Subresource (Twilio Docs).
- If porting is not a possibility, but it’s mission critical that your customers never have to pay for a long-distance call, use a toll-free number.
As we work hard to keep a wide variety of phone numbers in stock at all times, we cannot guarantee the phone numbers of your preference is in our inventory. If owning a local phone number is crucial to your business and numbers in your local calling area are not available, consider porting your own local number into Twilio for free.