On Thursday, the +383 country dialing code for Kosovo was used for the first time. Agron Mustafa, the director of Kosovo Telecom, gleefully demonstrated to the media that calls through the Vala operator can be made by using the +383 dialing code. The call went through successfully, but the new code has yet to work when calling from other operators, including IPKO.

The International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency, allocated Kosovo a code on December 15, 2016. “After discussions with ARKEP [the Regulatory Authority for Electronic and Postal Communications], we received their authorization to allow us and all other operators to start using the new dialling code,” Mustafa said on Thursday.

Kosovo Telecom has used +381, Serbia’s dialing code, for landline calls, while its mobile operator Vala uses Monaco’s +377. IPKO, Kosovo’s second mobile provider, uses the Slovenian prefix +386.  

After a grace period of 18 months, all of these operators will be able to connect calls through the +383 code, Mustafa promised. Mustafa also pledged that the Serbian code used for landline calls will be replaced by the end of the year.

The same code will be used by the newly registered Serbian operator MTS d.o.o, which is expected to replace existing informal operators active in Serbian-majority regions in Kosovo.

Mehdi Latifi, the technical director of Kosovo Telecom and its representative in the Brussels-mediated dialogue with Serbia, said that they immediately sent requests for international operators to apply the code.

“Today we made our first step and wrote to international operators, who we have contractual relations with, to open the routes for the number +383 to us,” Latifi said.

In the meantime, only Vala users can use the new code.