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--- RE: Dial plan question (http://www1.pbxes.com/forum/threadid.php?threadid=1218457017)

Dial plan question

I would like to improve my dial plans.
Currently I use dial plans in my SPA atas, which I would like to get away from.
When I dial an 11 digit uk number the SPA strips the leading zero and adds 0044 to form the international dialling number (required for Voicetrading).
My PBXes trunk adds additional 000 (to form the Voicetrading premium route).
My problem is with misdialled calls. Agents sometimes dial too slowly or plain misdial numbers, the result is silence. The agent calls me to say the call has failed and I check the call monitor and see only 10 digits were dialled.
On a UK PSTN 3 tones would be heard with a 'you have dialled an incorrect number' type message. How can I trap errors like this and maybe get some kind of warning tone via PBXes ?
Regards

RE: Dial plan question

There are a couple of ways you can achieve this, and it depends on whether you want to retrain your agents to dial the country code on national VoIP calls or not.

On either case, PBXes will send the right message to your ATAs when the call fails for less or more digits. The advantages for retraining your agents to dial the country code are that, every call dialed will be easily identified in the Call Monitor, as well as that, agents will make a conscious effort since this call will not be going over a regular PSTN line from BT, for which they will no longer have to dial 9 before the national number.

After a couple of weeks they will be able dial UK numbers starting with 44 without giving it a second thought. That is 44 not 0044 as they are used to dial over the PSTN. To try this out pick one agent, the more prone to misdialed digits, and convert him to E.164 dialing for 2 weeks. Dial 44 and 10 digits for VoIP or just 10 digits for the BT lines.

Let me know if you want to try, and I will help you set it up.

RE: Dial plan question

I would prefer not to dial 44 as virtually every call is a UK number.
Call types are:
1) Normal uk calls via Voicetrading trunk (need 00000+country code)
2) National (0844,0845,0870,0871) calls via Voipcheap trunk (needs country code)
3) 0800 calls via BT featureline trunk (requires a 9 to go in front of the number, not international format)
4) International calls via Voicetrading (need 00000 in front of country code)
5) dial 9 to force any call via BT featureline (the only agent option).

At the moment I use the ATA to strip the leading zero of a UK call and add 0044, the PBXes trunk recognises the 00 and adds extra 000. The ATA also passes any number starting with 00 or 9 straight out without change.

I am not sure where to draw the line between ATA dialplans and PBXes dialplans. The less in the ATA the better really so that I can easily set up other (non SPA) devices. Major problem is agent dialling too few digits, ATA doesn't see 11 digits starting with a 0 so it doesn't append 0044, just puts out number as is. PSTN trunk doesn't see a leading 9 so ignores it, Voipcheap trunk doesn't see 0844, 0845 etc so ignores it. Voicetrading attempts to place it but call immediately fails and agent just gets silence with no indication that call has failed.

Any help appreciated with this
Regards

RE: Dial plan question

Well, you have hit the nail in the head with your comment: "I am not sure where to draw the line between ATA dial-plans and PBXes dial-plans".

That will depend a lot on whether you want to use other ATAs or IP phones, which don't support the same syntax in their dial-plans. But ensure they at least support a basic built-in dial-plan syntax. The lack of a local dial-plan hurt Grandstream for a long time, until they finally implement it in their latest ATAs.

I like the SPA line for their web interface, but mainly for the flexibility of their granular dial plan, even if I don't use it for complex validation. It's so much easier to validate dialed strings in the Dial Patterns of the Outbound Routes, and the Dial Rules of the Trunks. Best of all, you don't have to propagate the change on every SPA, just do it once in PBXes for all of them.

But let me take a look at your current SPA Dial Plan.

RE: Dial plan question

Hi,
SPA dialplans are:

(<0:0044>[1-9]xxxxxxxxxS0|00[2-9]x.|1xxS0|9x.|*xx|**xxxS0).

As you can see I tried to put a UK 11 digit call into International format, regular international calls as is, extension calls 3 digit beginning with 1, Pstn calls beginning with 9 as is, * and ** feature calls as is.

I have questions about using SPA or PBXes * features, but thats not so important at the moment (I currently use the transfer facility via Recall button to SPA).

I anticipate replacing some ATAs with Linksys SPA phones in the future, plus maybe some softphones, so a proper strategy that would trap also errors would be good.
Regards