*NEW* Geographic Number Lookup
 

Hi all,

This weekend we are releasing our new Geographic number lookup feature. The basic idea is for VoXaLot to find the closest geographic number for non-geographic numbers e.g. 13/1300 in Australia and 0870 in the UK:

e.g. Dialling 13 PIZZA VoXaLot finds the geographic number for your closest store.

Why is this useful you ask? Well in Australia 13/1300 numbers are charged by most Oz VoIP providers at approx 25c. If members were to use VoXaLot and a geographic number was found, the call would only cost 9.9 cents untimed.

The problem we are solving has an even bigger potential in the U.K see
www.saynoto0870.com as 0870 numbers in the UK are quite expensive to call.

This new feature is utilising the information stored within the e164.org database, so the community can really help each other by adding new numbers to this repository. See http://www.e164.org/non.php

Thanks.

Great!

More excellent work Martin, Evilbunny and others I am sure.

While not as expensive as 087x numbers, 084x are still more expensive then calling land lines and those numbers are in the DB as well...

While there is already a large DB of UK numbers, there is relatively few 13/1300 numbers in the database and we encourage everyone that ever dialed a number to help locate geographical numbers, or email/phone companies asking for them.

Straight out asking doesn't always work, however you can put a spin on it like, I'm going overseas and I couldn't dial a 13 number when I was out of the country last time is there an alternative number I can try.

Failing that, we have setup a special forum thread http://forum.e164.org/index.php?board=3.0 that people can post requests for numbers to.

If you want to manually lookup a number you can search via the main website, or via the e164 wap interface http://wap.e164.org

I can't seem to get expected results with the Non-Geo lookups via the dial plans.

My 1300 number does an ENUM lookup fine with the ENUM lookup using the 61387050300 for the lookup, but if I turn off ENUM lookup and just try Non-Geo lookup, then I don't get a match.

We use our [calling location] 'local' number in the Non-Geo lookup, don't we?

Can you show us some working examples of 1300 lookups using the Non-Geo feature please?

Np Affinity, I will post some examples within the next 24 hours

(sorry, deleted post as I already solved the problem)

How do i configure the dial plan for non-geo lookup?
 

I found the following in the when i clicked on the edit link for one the entries on the dial plan page:

Geographic Number (Optional)
Geo Lookup
Yes No
whatever i put in the 'Geographic Number' box, results in the following error "xxxxxx is not a valid e164 number." e.g. if i enter ${EXTEN} i get "${EXTEN} is not a valid e164 number."

What is the correct syntax/format for the 'Geographic Number' box.

The dial plan i am trying this on is for UK 0870 numbers.

Same query here. I guess I'm being thick, but I can't see how to use the Geo Lookup feature either.

Martin may have only been checking for Australian numbers, and needs to add some code to accept UK numbers, as a work around try entering 02<8 digits>

Thanks Evilbunny. But I haven't got that far. I'm stuck as to what to put in the dial plan - it rejects everything I've tried as "xxxxxx is not a valid e164 number."