Numbering Plans... Thoughts

Doing some rebuilding and tidying up of my VOIP system trixbox 1.2.24, and latest Fpbx…

One thing that comes to mind is making the “whole thing” extremely modular.

To that end I start by classifying all types of calls into separate outbound routes… i.e. Emergency (000 - I am in Australia, not 911)
Local Calls 3XXXXXXX
National Calls 0[2378] XXXXXXXX
Mobiles 04XXXXXXXX
International 0011 (and the number parsing starts to get ugly)

But… I still want to be able to go direct to VSP Numbers i.e. FWD 393XXXXXX (except that gets confusing, because the XXXXXX numbers for FWD can be from 5 to 7 digits long, which means that they overlap the local 3XXXXXXX numbers…

So, I am thinking that *393 for direct to FWD makes sense, but then a lot of the freepbx feature codes start with a *, so maybe a **393 would be more appropriate - In fact, for all of the various VSP’s are according to http://www.sipbroker.com/sipbroker/action/providerWhitePages (which are 3 or 4 digit prefixes use the **XXX or **XXXX to “Preselect” that route, either for a number in that VSP’s number space, or possibly to route through that VSP. *XX and *XXX can still be “feature codes” and normal numbers remain the same…

Does that make sense, or are there other approaches that people are using…

Edit: although I just noticed in /etc/asterisk/features.conf ** is set to disconnect a call. That may confuse things…

Asterisk (and FreePBX) uses pattern matching for calls, so “overlaps” don’t necessarily confuse it.

The only time you have an issue, is if you have a PSTN number like “39301234” AND a FWD number that is the same. You can’t have two outbound routes match this number (only the first one will ever match). In this case, you may need to have a prefix for dialing one of them (probably FWD). Even having a feature code *39 and using *393XXXXXX as a pattern is not a problem, because it matches the full pattern.

FWD is a bit of an oddity here - PSTN numbers don’t overlap like this, and even enum has its own international dial prefix (88299) which doesn’t conflict with any real PSTN numbers.


Greg MacLellan - Core FreePBX Developer
http//freepbx.org - irc.freenode.net #freepbx