[usa2k]

Originally Posted by mberlant

ieee1394, how would you propose distinguishing a 10-digit North American phone number from a 10-digit international number?

From Vonage:

"You should also verify that you dialed the call correctly. If you are calling internationally (except to certain Caribbean islands), you should dial "011" prior to dialing the number. Please keep in mind that due to the routing and/or distance of International calls, some customers may have to wait before you hear the phone ringing. Give it a full 60 seconds before you hang up an international call."

https://www.vonage.com/help_knowledg...hp?article=332

Using "011" makes dialing consistent.

[mberlant]

Originally Posted by ieee1394

On the other hand, I liked the way that Vonage implemented international long distance by eliminating the 011; instead, just start every call with the country code.

Not being a Vonage customer, I took this comment at face value. Thanks for clarifying, usa2k.

[PhoneBoy]

Originally Posted by mberlant

ieee1394, how would you propose distinguishing a 10-digit North American phone number from a 10-digit international number? You would need to put the North American Country Code in front of these numbers, as well. With pure 10-digit dialing you couldn't distinguish the Singaporean cell phone, 65-9345-6789 from an ordinary Alabama telephone 659-345-6789. You need the 1 in front, I would suggest.

It's funny you bring that up. A friend of mine who has Lingo showed be a couple of bills that had incorrectly rated calls. The calls were dialed 10 digits (e.g. 408-xxx-yyyy). These were rated as calls to Romania (i.e. country code 40). Obviously, he got credited for those calls and they fixed their billing system straight away.

I had a detailed response to this issue in the past, either here or DSLR. Regardless I really do not feel like typing it all again. This thread starts with an interesting point however, and that is with the poll. The poll assumes that 10 digit dialing is the norm, and that you can either select the 'norm' or elect to vote for a 'one off'. This is not a fair statement. As I indicated in the private forum not all areas, not even close, are using a required 10 digit dialing.

When we had 7, 10, and 11 digits with the Sipura it was not working out well, EVERYONE was complaining about post dial delays. For reasons that I detailed in the very long post I referred to at the beginning of this post this can not be corrected. The choice is to have all three dial plans; and live with the dial delays for everyone, or standardize on 7 and 11 digits, OR 10 and 11 Digits. In looking at the required and acceptable dial patterns nationwide, and the dialing habits of our customers we found that 7 digit dialing is still very popular; more so than 10 digit dialing. As a result 11 digit dialing was still very acceptable as well.

I am not saying that this will never change however this serves the greatest number of people without those people learning something new. It is not our objective to make things more difficult, and I for one would prefer 10 digit dialing as this is what I use on my cellular phone. I will give some more thought to offering control over the two methods through the portal. Even if something like this were implemented it would take a while.

Regarding the post dial delay, that has nothing to do with this issue, and I believe that this can be increased. I THINK that the inter-digit delay is something like 5 seconds, meaning you can wait 5 seconds between digits prior to getting a reorder tone; I would think that this is long enough.

[ieee1394]

Originally Posted by usa2k

From Vonage:

If you are calling internationally (except to certain Caribbean islands), you should dial "011" prior to dialing the number.

Using "011" makes dialing consistent.

Okay, when I saw that I thought "Was I mistaken??? Has my memory started to erode significantly??" I distinctly remembered that dialing every call (in the world) by starting with the country code was not only a neat feature but also totally cool and totally consistent. In fact, I was not mistaken. Here is an article from this year that talks about this feature...

http://www.humaninet.org/wis/telecom/vonage.shtm

And here is the quote (found under Usage):

"Because Vonage acts like an international phone, you don't need to dial an international access code such as 011, but you must always dial the country code before the local number. Once, attempting to dial a local Portland, OR number in area code 503, I accidently omitted the 1 (the country code for the US) and was soon speaking to a very confused resident of El Salvador."

So maybe Vonage has changed something when they introduced 7 digit dialing? I've subscribed to Vonage since May 2003 but haven't used it much since picking up BVX in December. Shrug.

As for "Using "011" makes dialing consistent." I don't know what that means. Consistent to whom? North Americans I guess. It is certainly much more straightforward to not have support for 7-digit and 10-digit dialing and to make everyone start each and every call with the country code. After all, the world is getting smaller and international long distance usage is rising.

Why in the world does anyone support 7-digit dialing anyhow? Geez. I haven't used that type of dialing pattern since maybe the mid eighties. So then what is the big deal with 10-digit dialing anyway? Is it really that much more difficult to dial the "1" before the 10 digits? I really don't think so. The one and only need to support 10 digits, and 7 digits, and 011, is to make dialing consistent with POTS. Maybe that's not the best answer.

What the VOIP companies (like BVX) could do, if they were smart, sophisticated, and motivated (and I'm not sure they are any of these things) is to make a little card or sticky that could be attached near someone's phone to alert all potential users that the dialing pattern is different. You know, like they do in hotel rooms. Then supply your customers with as many of these things as they want. Or hey, you could even do this as a downloadable PDF file that customers could print out themselves (if you wanted to be extremely cheap about it).

[ieee1394]

If it really bothers anyone to dial 11 digits instead of 10 or 7 or whatever, why not just setup speed dials (you get 20 after all) with the numbers you dial most frequently? That will drop the dialing pattern down to three keys.

[jsb]

Programming speed dial numbers is yet another PITA which I seek to avoid, techno-geek though I might be after hours. 8)

Anyhow, I think we're discussing the rest of the family, plus our friends, neighbors, repairmen, business associates, and anyone else who might spot our phones and grab one with certain expectations about it's operation. This extended community will not be favorably impressed with our whiz-bang Internet phones.