For example, the country I live in is Ireland and the calling code is +353, why is it so high?
In: 1
Some countries only have two digits, or even one (looking at you, USA & Canada). Also, country codes are grouped by region – 2 is Africa, 3 and 4 are Europe, 5 is South America, etc.
COUNTRY dialling codes were agreed in the early 1960s by the International Telecoms Union (a club of each country’s network providers). In the days of mechanical telephone exchanges, it was convenient to split the world into broad areas: 1 for USA, 2 for Africa, 3 and 4 for Europe, etc.
What you are talking about is specific to phone networks. These numbers are not a sequential list of countries but are rather technical tools for network operators. The country codes are not the same length. Some countries are larger then others so in order for each person to have a number of roughly the same length larger countries were given shorter country codes and smaller countries were given longer country codes. This is why for example Great Britain is +44 while Ireland is +353. There are no countries with country code +35 because that would not work when dialing a number on the phone.
The list of country codes also have lots of holes in them. Some are there to make the routing easier. The codes are grouped by region so a phone operator only need to look at the first digit to know which continent to route the call to, the second digit to know which area of the continent to route the call to, etc. But that leaves some holes where the number of countries in a region is not divisible by ten. And sometimes holes have been left to allow for changes in the system. For example a couple of countries do have assigned country codes they do not use and might be willing to give away. And sometimes when there are major changes to the administrative boarders in a region the country codes gets changed in that region.
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