Welcome to the Broadvox Direct Forum!

Welcome to the Broadvox Direct forum.

First of all I would like to thank Marcelo Rodriquez for the gracious offer in establishing this forum for Broadvox Direct.

Here I invite everyone to join in on conversations regarding both VoIP as a technology as well as Broadvox Direct. I will be happy to address your questions and inquiries as well as share upcoming Broadvox Direct news and industry views.

Regards,

Jeffery Williams
President
Broadvox Direct, Llc
www.broadvoxdirect.com

Best Wishes

I'm pleased to be the first member of your new User Group. I look forward to continuing to learn much from you regarding VoIP and Broadvox. I have very much enjoyed reading your postings on the DSLReports Forum.

Best wishes.

I have been enjoying your replies to the many varied questions. The technical answers have been the most enlightening of all.

I'll start the ball rolling with some issues of the weekend. About 10/11 digit dialing. I lived in an area (or maybe two) that had 10 digit dialing. I don't recall getting a wrong number but if there is a delay to tell if there is only 7 digits then maybe I never exceeded it. Maybe one person's suggestion to have user select all 10 digits or option to have 10/7 digit dialing. So many metro areas are now getting overlays that skipping "my" area code in dialing just doesn't seem all that important anymore.

I remember in 50's in MI we SAID the 4 digits to an operator to call locally. In 60's a new system put in direct dial and WOW we got dials on our phones! We could still dial 4 digits. Then a few years later they sold out to Michigan Bell and mandatory 7 digit dialing was turned on. What an uproar that was for the locals.

Way back then we called one long distance call annually to grandma and kept it to 3 minutes, $6.85. I vaugely recall minimum wage was 35 cents / hour in mid - late fifties ? Now is about $6, imagine a 3 minute call at 18 x $6 ?. You could have three UNLIMITED plans from 3 companies for the same hours worked! as that one 3 minute call way back then.

I just ordered a Siprua last week from Voxilla and am expecting it real soon now. I will look forward to what you offer to dsl reports readers.

jwilliams. Just came over from dslreports anxious to get some posts going on this baby!

10/11 Digit dialing

Here in the Houston area, we now have 10 digit dialing for everything. While it was a PITA initially, dialing 11 digits for every call using Vonage actually made things easier... didn't have to think about which calls needed the "1" and which ones didn't. Dialing all numbers was exactly the same.

Dan

OK... I'm ready!

Hehe... Vonage has been up and down all afternoon... I'm ready to move!

Jeff... help, quick!

Dan

I came on over too

I enjoyed following your posts on Broadband Reports. I am very new to VOIP and plan on giving it a try.

Jeff

Came over to this forum from dsl reports. Very much appreciated Mr Williams postings at dsl reports and hope for more of the same here.

The concept being 7 digit or 10 digit dialing will be the same as in legacy deployments such as that of SBC, for example.

One of the main reasons for 10 digit dialing is that in some areas, as a reult of area code splits, you will have one part of a given area code that is a local call, while other sections may not be. Additionally another area code, in whole or part, may also be local to you. For that reason 10 digit dialing offers uniformity.

Broadvox gives you the choice! Within your own area code you may dial 7 digits, or elect to dial 10, or even 11 if you prefer. Our switch will prepend your own area code when completing your call, if you have not already included it.

Being that Broadvox Direct offers entire area codes as local calling areas, the need for 10 digit calling is not there and as such we can give customers a choice.

As an alternate example we enforce 10 digit dialing throughout most markets with our enterprise subsidiary. The reason being? We do not offer unlimited calling, in all cases, to entire area codes, therefore 10 digit dialing is required in order to properly account for that call traffic.

Brand New Here

Well, I am new to Voxilla forums, and will likely be here more frequently.

I've seen a number of familiar names here, and it will take a while to catch up a bit ...

. . . first post . . . . here it goes . . .

Welcome USA2K.

prayer, In a traditional (legacy) telephony environment your telephone connected through would you can look at as a long extension cord to a 'switch'. All the dialing plans, rules, translations, etc. Are embedded in the switch.

In the case of VoIP your switch port is extended to your home (The telephone adapter) and the switch still resides at the service provider. Other than by way of deployment topology the technology has not changed a great deal.

The rules (Dial plan) that accept digits and in some cases provide a mask (some alteration to what you have dialed) for the switch are embedded within the telephone adapter in a VoIP deployment and in the Trunk card (what the line plugs into from your home to the phone company in a legacy world) when considering your 'old' style phone company. Unlike the typical VoIP adapter with two ports a trunk card can have up to 768 however the job of each is much the same.

In a legacy world the dial plans are stored in memory on these trunk cards and are considerable in size. With the VoIP adapters available today however the memory space is pretty limited and the complexity of the dial plans is as well.

In a legacy world a dial plan might consider an area code only in applying a rule, while in another area the NPA / NXX (Area code / prefix). With the ability to get that granular they can control the number of digits that are looked for by what you are dialing, digit by digit.

With the limited memory capacity and relatively simplistic algorithms available in a VoIP device (as they exist today) we can not get that granular and in those cases need to settle on a simpler approach in order to maintain a PSTN 'feel' and provide for a consistent user experience.

Throughout our development cycle we made every attempt to keep 7, 10, and 11 digit dialing available however with the differences in telephone adapters, the rules they will accept, etc. This became an increasing challenge. Attempting to maintain varied rules (this adapter can do these things, and is probably set like XX, while this adapter can only handle this, unless you also have this

I know at one point you had talked about giving customers the choice of *either* 7 or 10 digit dialing, but not both at the same time. This is probably needed to emulate the PSTN look and feel in areas with overlay codes. Is that still on the books?

It is not a priority however it is still on the project list somewhere. I would not look for this functionality anytime soon. The problem is that we would programatically need to change the way we profile hardware and allow for multiple profiles for each brand / and even firmware version in some cases. Then we would need to apply a specific list of profiles to a specific piece of hardware, to a specific account. The reason being is that again firmware changes can cause a dial plan change, not every user with that hardware will have the same version of firmware. Additionally not all features in a dial plan will work with other features. While the added functionality sounds simple enough it had proven to be a pretty complex task (to handle all the variables) and we have other more important issues to address with regards to development at the present time.

Wondering . . . . . . . . . . . . if a user configurable 10 or 7 choice on the portal would simplify the complexity?

. . . . _ . . . . 7 digit dialing, prefix 1-734
. . . . X . . . . 10 digit dialing

And like I've said before, with the user in control, you can pick a suitable 7 digit dialing default in spite of the actual number. That makes it a more powerful feature. If you make it exclusive 10 OR 7, then your delay is moot.

If the DTA 2102 were the only device that was deployed then this would not be so bad. At present time we deploy about a dozen devices with our service. We have private label clients that sell residential service under their own name and we provide all switching, transport, billing, provisioning, etc. We also have the Enterprise side.

We would have to build logic that would be 'aware' of each device, what the provisioning scripts would look like depending upon the dialing pattern selected, which devices could be provisioned in such a way and which devices could not. We would need to know how to automatically control the availability, in real-time, of when to display this feature as an option (some hardware can not be remotely provisioned for things like this, or can not accept these types or parameters).