[asterisk-users] Not Dialing 9

[Wilton Helm]

I set up a couple of PABXs this way 25 years ago.  It was a little simpler then because there was a more uniform number plan in the US back then, although most of the industry people I talked to though I was totally crazy.  It was a 300 station 3 digit extensions system.  It worked well for a number of years.

As was previously mentioned briefly, early PABXs not only didn't have pattern matching, many couldn't do store and forward dialing, so 9 literally connected you to a trunk where you got a second dial tone from the CO before you could do more dialing.  That's this history of it.

Where I live now in Colorado we have 1+ for long distance and 10 digits for the two local area codes.  Other areas are different.  Since the two local area codes are 303 and 720, there are four leading sequences possible
    1+ for toll
    303+ for local
    720+ for local
    0+ for anything operator or credit card related.

For my SOHO setup, I opted to used two digit extensions of the form 2+
If I run out, I will use 4+

The one I did 25 years ago was more complicated because the CO allowed (so people were used to) 7 digit dialing.  LD could be 1+ seven or 10 digits.  I basically avoided local prefixes and hoped the CO didn't throw me too many curve balls.  The biggest curve ball was when the changed the meaning of 1 from long distance (7 or 10) to area code prefix.  Suddenly what people had to at home created conflicts between non-local prefixes in the area code and extension numbers.  We just left the old rules in effect, as most people were dialing either local or out of area code anyway.

BTW, I'm not aware of any shift towards 8, except that the Hotel/Motel industry has been using both 8 and 9 to differentiate between local and long distance.  It makes programming the switch much simpler.

Wilton
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20090109/631134d9/attachment.htm