Using dial plans to restrict overseas calls to land lines

[NeBlackCat]

I'm with PennyTel, who have great flat rates to land lines in various countries. I'm using this to let overseas students studying here call home for 8c or 40c unmetered.

The problem is, though, that I have to stop them dialing overseas numbers which would be far more expensive and metered, like their mates' mobile phones.

I thought PennyTel would have some feature to do that (ie. an "allow flat rate calls only" option) but they don't, and setting up corresponding dial plans in my Billion voip router for all the possible destination countries would be just too big and error prone.

So I wondered whether Voxalot could help, but so far (reading the dial plan tutorial) I haven't found anything.

So my question is: would a "number is landline" test that can be used in dial plans, irrespective of the country being dialed, be a useful and implementable feature?

[kurun]

You can set up entries in your dial plan to send the calls you want to block to a non-functional number or test message like *600 (Echo test), or *2585555555 (Busy sound) using voxalot or sipbroker as provider.
You can also set up entries for the countries you want to allow via your provider of choice.

This may result in a long dial plan, but should be able to handle what you need.

Please post back if you need more specific dial plan setup, with details of numbers you would like to block or accept.

[NeBlackCat]

Originally Posted by kurun

You can set up entries in your dial plan to send the calls you want to block to a non-functional number or test message like *600 (Echo test), or *2585555555 (Busy sound) using voxalot or sipbroker as provider.
You can also set up entries for the countries you want to allow via your provider of choice.

This may result in a long dial plan, but should be able to handle what you need.

Please post back if you need more specific dial plan setup, with details of numbers you would like to block or accept.

Hi, thanks but that's the whole problem - to have to work out what "area code" prefixes are ok and what aren't for every possibly country, and express it, debug it and then maintain it (as these things aren't constant) in unwieldy ATA dial plans, is simply impossible. I started trying to do it yesterday and rapidly learned that.

The required information obviously already exists and is kept current in databases as (for example) providers have to charge for calls on the basis of what type of destination number in what country is called.

I still think it would be a great feature for Voxolot (or equivalent) to provide access to that in an easily testable way, as a value added feature to compensate for the fact that vsps don't.

[kurun]

You can develop the dial plan based on Country and Number codes you want to allow as a CSV file generated using the editing power of a spread sheet program for example. This will significantly speed up the process.

The CSV file can then be imported into the Dial plan in Voxalot using the import feature.

[NeBlackCat]

Originally Posted by kurun

You can develop the dial plan based on Country and Number codes you want to allow as a CSV file generated using the editing power of a spread sheet program for example. This will significantly speed up the process.

The CSV file can then be imported into the Dial plan in Voxalot using the import feature.

That would help with the typing, but it doesnt help harvesting what prefixes in 90 odd countries are landlines, and keeping it up to date!

Unless you know of a source of that information which is importable into Excel, Access or some other db?

[kurun]

Yes, I have a list of country codes/area/mobile , but I will look it up later and post again.

[kurun]

Try the following link (courtesy of les.net) : http://les.net/itu_cc.txt