The present call/ring group limitation restricts the Asterisk to 32 customers on one server. This is because the *8 function works across context settings. Changing it to 64 would not help a lot. I would like to have more than 1000 extensions one one server distributed on up to 100 customers. Further, when I move a customer from one server to another, I would like to keep the call/ring groups. So please increase the number range, allow alphanumeric strings and/or make it context sensitive!

To me this is obsurd. Why is this a numeric value? Why isn't this an alphanumeric value like everything else? And even if it is numeric, what possible reason could there be to limiting it to 31 (or even 63 in newer versions)? Granted, I know I'm not the one programming it and I should be grateful that it is here at all (and I am). But I have helped a decent amount on the documentation of * (Especially on MySQL which was in bad need of documentation at the time) and I decided to go ahead and put my opinion on this out.