dial plan oddity
 

I'm trying to setup a dial plan that allows me to select a particular provider by dialing a prefix, like so:

Pretty standard stuff, right? Except it doesn't work!

When I dial #3NNNN on the phone, the SIP logs of my SPA-2102 show that it is sending it to %233NNNN@us.voxalot.com (note the "#" has been escaped as %23) and Voxalot comes back with "the number you've called cannot be connected, please try again". I also tried ${EXTEN:4} to cope with the escaping, but that didn't change the outcome.

If I change the above dial plan to:

and dial 3*NNNN instead, then I can see in the logs that the request goes out to the unescaped address 3*NNNN@us.voxalot.com and the call actually completes with Provider3 as expected.

Now the question: Is this a bug? Or have I misunderstood how Voxalot dialplans are supposed to work?

Any clues appreciated.

P.S: My SPA dialplan is very simple:

I am using this without a problem:

_#1XX. ${EXTEN:2} Provider 1
_#2XX. ${EXTEN:2} Provider 2

Interesting, what kind of ATA do you have? If possible, could you kindly confirm if it does the same escaping as mine does?

I can confirm that using "_#1XX." instead of "_#1." doesn't make it work for me. I've tried it with a few different providers, so it doesn't seem provider specific.

I'm using a Sipura SPA-2000. Here is the dial plan I am using:
Not sure how to test what is being sent to Voxalot.

I found a reference to the same problem in another thread here, so it seems like a Voxalot dial plan implementation issue. That thread seems to have ended with an explanation that is incorrect--the SPA is able to pass the "#" character through iff it is part of the SPA dialplan, even if the "#" is at the end of the dialed sequence. For example, if your SPA dialplan is ([x#*][x#*].) dialing #123# will send all five characters through and the "send" function associated with # is disabled.

Chances are the issue at hand is somehting along these lines http://forum.voxalot.com/voxalot-sup....html#post5902

So this is a hardware specific issue or rather an issue possibly confined to Certain ATAs and VoXalot...

The fact that most other Linksys devices can work fine with VoXalot...makes me think that chances are that an upgrade to the firmware of SPA2100 you have may take care of this...

But....is it worth the time and headache to go upgrading firmware when you could just as easily use _1*x. for example...?

Thanks for finding that thread, yes it is exactly the same issue.

The only reason I would like to use the #N sequence is because my folks at home have already been trained to use it from my previous SPA dialplan and I don't want to have to retrain them. It took a while to train them the first time around. :)

Assuming this can't be easily fixed on the Voxalot side or by a firmware update, it should be possible for me to just do a SPA dialplan-level translation like this and change the Voxalot dialplan to use N* instead of #N:

I hope that would do the trick.

Thanks again for the feedback!

I'm now using this (slightly more elegant) SPA dialplan to workaround the issue:

Works like a charm.