0412, 0417, 0418…: which carrier owns which mobile prefix?

Who Called Australia editorial team · Updated: 31/08/2026

Australia's mobile prefixes are a fossil record. The 04xx block a number sits in tells you which carrier was allocated that range — and often when, all the way back to the brick-phone era. Porting means the prefix no longer proves the current network, but the history is real, it's in the official register, and it's often genuinely useful context on a number. A short tour.

The analogue inheritance: 0417, 0418, 0419

Australia's first mobile network — analogue AMPS, launched 1987 — used short codes like 017, 018 and 019. The 1990s GSM migration and the move to ten-digit numbering mapped those subscribers to 0417, 0418 and 0419— Telstra-line ranges that carry the country's earliest mobile adopters. Tradies, farmers and small businesses that got a mobile in 1993 are still on these numbers, which is why the community pages for them skew toward "legitimate business" reports.

The GSM land grab: 0411, 0412, 0414, 0415…

The early digital era handed each network its launch ranges: 0411rode with Vodafone's arrival, 0412and neighbours with Optus, further 041x with Telstra's GSM push. The register still shows that layered allocation, prefix by prefix — each prefix page on this site breaks its 04xx block into the actual allocated slices with their register holders, which is more precise than folk memory: many prefixes are shared between carriers at finer granularity than the four digits suggest.

Corporate archaeology: collapses, mergers, MVNOs

Range holdings also record corporate history. One.Tel's 2001 collapse scattered its allocations; Vodafone and 3 merged their holdings in 2009 (and the TPG merger reshuffled them again); and the MVNO boom pushed newer ranges — much of 045x through 048x — to wholesalers and virtual operators. When our carrier pagesshow a company you've never heard of holding millions of numbers, you're usually looking at a wholesale aggregator whose capacity retails under a dozen consumer brands.

What a prefix can and can't tell you today

• Can:the register holder of the range, its allocation history, and a decent prior on network and number age. A 30-year-old 0418 number and a fresh 0480 number have very different base rates for "established business" vs "burner".
• Can't: the current network of a specific service (porting), the identity of the caller, or whether the display is even real (spoofing).

For any specific number, the reverse lookup combines all three layers: the exact register range with holder and dates, the prefix context, and what other people report the number actually doing.