30 years of 020
We hardly need to explain that 020 is the area code of Greater Amsterdam. But why didn't the capital simply get the very first area code? Why does Rotterdam walk away with the honour of 010? The answer begins somewhere in the 1980s, when the Dutch telephone networks got a major makeover.
Between 1988 and 1991 the country switched to longer telephone numbers: seven digits after the area code became the new standard. And so Amsterdam became '020'. Do the maths: that means Amsterdammers have only been saying 020 with pride for about thirty years. Pretty young for such a firmly rooted piece of city identity.
Decibel
In the renumbering operation the big cities went before the smaller ones because demand for numbers was greatest there: the number of subscribers kept rising steadily, so telephone numbers kept getting longer. That is obviously awkward, and so the need for shorter numbers soon arose. With Operation Decibel the whole country was finally equipped with 10-digit telephone numbers in 1995. When renumbering, the PTT (the Dutch state telephone company) chose to make the new area codes resemble their five-digit predecessors as closely as possible. That is how Amsterdam's code 02900 was changed to 020, while Rotterdam went from 01800 to 010.
Another renumbering?
So it is pure coincidence that 020 is inseparably linked to Amsterdam. By the way, a new Operation Decibel would be rather impractical: 020 probably adorns the bodies of quite a few Amsterdammers, and it would be a shame to have to redo all those tattoos. And anyway, who still has a landline?
