North American Toll Free Numbers
 

We currently list 3 providers in the US making money terminating internet to PSTN toll free calls. Unfortunately due to the way the North American phone system works you can't tell if you can dial a +1 toll free number via these providers without actually dialling it and seeing what error codes you get back.

I don't know of any providers offering this for Canadian toll free numbers so I can't redirect the calls even if we do know which numbers are for which country.

In any case I think there is a partial solution to this long vexing problem. I've extended the Non-Geographical Numbering system of e164.org to accept +18(00|66|77|88) XXXXXXX non-geographical numbers which can be pointed via a TEL: URI to a geographical number, or an alternative non-geographical number, or a 'novoip' record which is just a place holder to override the wild card record.

Canada uses the same 1-800/866/877/888 numbering that the US uses...

From my experience most Canadian Toll Free numbers are reachable from the US anyways so the current providers tend to deliver calls without issues...

One thing I've noticed is that for smaller operations, they tend to limit who can reach their 1-800 numbers based on Area Code, which may result in being unable to reach some 1-800 numbers when going through e164.org or SipBroker once in a while

The answer is it depends if they are willing to pay more to accept 'international' calls in Canada from the US. Regardless of area code sent, the Canadian tax service tells you to use their international toll free number, although most calls just don't connect at all. I was thinking changing the area code might be all that was needed too but it's more complex then that.

Actually its a little of both... while we do allow canadian headed toll free numbers we can't guarantee that the call will complete... same thing with US numbers... it is possible that even on a US number a regional restriction can kick in... while we make the best effort to set the originating jurisdictional code on the SS7 side of the network we can only do this with a valid NANPA CallerID number being sent... sending your local pbx extension pretty much requires us to reset the ANI to something in our area the we control or in a large number of cases the calls will not go thru..

K

When you are handling a call directly from someone's ATA, like a Linksys SPA2102, do you take the User ID field as the NANPA CallerID number? If so, should the User ID show the phone number with or without the 1, 360xxxxxxx or 1360xxxxxxx?

Either with or with the 1 is fine so NPANXXXXXX is fine... in regex speak
1?[2-9]\d{2}[2-9]\d{6}

if it matches that we should be good

Also Just FYI we have done some testing o the Canadian Toll Frees and its hit or miss right now... I do have a canadian partner that I am speaking with about doing canadian term thru them once we finnish up our SS7 interconnects to the tollfree platform (we still have some code to finnish up there to translate SMS800 lookups) once we have thatwe should be able to 'fix' the candian routing problem


Also if anyone reading this happens to work at any service providers and you have a fair ammount of outbound toll free traffic contact me off list