QUESTION Best practice for phone number format

[mardosas]

I just realized that am not sure in which format to store phone numbers as an outbound CID of an extension or a route/ trunk.

Shall phone numbers be stored in E.164 format? Or E.164 format but without “+”?

Is there a general rule or best practice how to format phone numbers in Incredible PBX?

An advice very much appreciated!

Thanks,

--Mardas

 

[kenn10]

That would depend on your country. In the USA, I prefer using only the area code plus number without the "+" or "1" in front. If your carrier requires a country code, insert is on the outbound route. On inbound calls, I display only the 10 digits and store them in the Asterisk phone book that way. On outbound calls, I only send the 10 digit number use the outbound routes to insert whatever the carrier needs.

I imagine in areas where there is not a uniform dial plan length, you would need to give some thought to how you wish to display and send the caller-id.

 

[jerrm]

I would say its user preference as long as the dialplan can handle it. Being in the US, we normalize all inbound and outbound NANP numbers to 10 digits so caller id, cdr, etc always show as 10 digits - but the dial plan has to accommodate any valid variation.

For my clients international dialing is not much of an issue, so we pretty much leave non-NANP as is.

Way back when, my initial dial plans didn't take the possibility of a a leading "+". All was well for a while until we deployed our first softphones and folks started calling contacts that had been saved in their contacts with a leading "+".