[asterisk-users] DISABLE 9?

[Gordon Henderson]

On Sun, 15 Apr 2007, Matt wrote:

> Have you never run into a situation where you dial +15705551212 for a
> number, but also have an extention of 157 or something?   The 9 is legacy,
> yes, but still important, in my opinion, to segregate the networks.   You
> know that anything starting with a 9 is going to go outbound, and all of
> your extentions are then 1xx-8xx.  9anything is reserved for going to the
> PSTN.  Otherwise, you are either going to have to have your callers dial
> 1areacode for everything (and then have your extentions 2xx-9xx), that is
> they can't just dial 5551212, which is a pain, or you are going to have
> overlap.
>
> The 9 may be legacy, but it is somewhat important!

I've written about my situations before, but made the decision that I'd 
not force the dial-9 thing on my clients (unless they specifically asked 
for it!)

I'm in the UK though, so things might not work this way elsewhere!

Essentially, I treat numbers starting with 0 as outside numbers, and I 
include that leading zero in the outgoing number. Punters can still dial 0 
to get the local "operator" though - this is handled correctly in the 
dialplan;

   exten => 0,1,Noop(Calling the Operator)

has a higher priority than:

   exten =>  _0.,1,Noop(Outside line request: Dialled 0...)

In the UK, we (still) have the concept of a local number and a national 
number - for a local number we don't need to dial the STD code (area 
code), however for some years now, it's not mattered if we do dial the STD 
code, so the "issue" with the above is that you need to dial the full 
number (including your local STD code, if it's a local call).

I personally see this as no big deal - we've had to do this on mobiles for 
many years now, and incoming caller ID has always had the full number 
presented for some time, so if you have existing phones with displays and 
phone books then they "just work" when migrated over to PBXs.

Additionally, a lot of my customers are migrating from "a phone and a fax" 
type scenarios to having a PBX and they're simply not used to dialling 
9...

There are cases where you need to dial 9 though. To call some local 
services - eg. 1570, (BT VoiceMail thing), 150 (faults) 118xxx (directory 
enquiries), so for these I have provided the 9 prefix, although I could 
simply hard-wire them into the dialplan (which I do for 999)

Going back to the OPs request - I think you need to learn to write the 
dialplan rather than (I suspect) rely on some GUI doing it for you - or 
atleast work out how to compliment the GUI (or whatever is generating 
your dial-plan) with your own additions.

Get the Asterisk book - either buy it off Amazon, or get the PDF - links 
to it have been posted here recently, so search the archives!

Gordon