ENGLAND — Annoying roommates or lovers with a phone sex habit, as well as minors who don’t care to obey age restrictions, will find it harder to pay for dirty talk thanks to a new telephone prefix blocking service available to British telephone service customers.The service isn’t actually anything new – but the prefixes being assigned to the phone sex lines are. The intent, however, is not so much to make it easier for customers to remember their favorite trash talkin’ cuties phone number, as it is to make it easier for parents and disapproving adult partners to block access to the numbers.

This decision is one of several proposed by Ofcom in an attempt to renovate the telephone prefix code system, which the telecom regulator says has been struggling to keep up with the number of interested telephone users.

Stephen Carter, chief executive of Ofcom, says that the agency hopes the new prefixes will make it possible for phone owners to immediately identify calls by seeing their prefix. Most adult focused and premium rate lines, for instance, currently begin with 09.

If Ofcoms’ latest recommendations become policy, various premium-rate phone services would include a third, distinctive, number followed by the current 09 prefix. This would allow customers to block access to numbers including those rate and content indicators.

In 2004 Ofcom assigned the 056 prefix to those making telephone calls via high speed internet.