Last-call return

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Last Call Return, commonly called Call Return, is a telephone feature code offered by telephone service providers to give a called party the time and telephone number of the last received call, and may also offer the facility to place a call back to the calling party.

The access number for this facility varies per country and provider:

• Australia: *10# (*69 on Optus HFC Telephony) This only allows you to hear the last unanswered call, and costs 30 cents every time you use it.
• Canada and United States: star code *69 (*66 in some markets); 1169 (1166 in some markets) on rotary phone/pulse dial telephones. (In the USA, "to star-69" is sometimes used as a verb)
• France: 3131
• Israel: *42
• United Kingdom: 1471 (also used in Gibraltar, Ireland and the Falkland Islands)

In the UK, after dialing "1471", the caller can press "3" to automatically return the call. Until August 2004, this service was free; since that date it has incurred a charge, as of 10 January 2007 a per call fee of 10.5 pence is charged. It was the topic of a 2001 episode of the sitcom Coupling.

The service provider may also offer a facility through which the calling party can prevent their number being revealed to the called party, either permanently or on a per-call basis. This is achieved by prefixing the dialed number with:

• United Kingdom: 141 on landlines, and #31# on mobile phones
• United States: *67
• Australia: 1831

Conversely, to send the caller number on a line where the number is normally withheld, the following prefixes can be dialled:

• Ireland: 142
• United Kingdom: 1470 (also used in Gibraltar)
• United States: *82

In Ireland and Gibraltar, ex-directory or unlisted numbers are withheld by default.

In Canada, the feature is commonly marketed by telephone companies as a combination of two features:

• Call Again, a form of automatic ring back, allows a caller, on reaching a busy signal, to hang up, dial a special code, and be called back automatically when the called number is no longer busy, usually with a limit of 30 minutes.
• Call Return allows a customer to dial a code that identifies the last incoming call. On some types of central office equipment, it announces the number and offers the call-back option; on others, it simply attempts a connection without an announcement.

[edit] See also

• Vertical service code
• Prompt voice behind most U.S. AT&T implementations of this feature is Pat Fleet