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Conclusion
Asterisk’s voicemail system is a mature and capable module, and an essential part of
any PBX. It’s not likely to be enhanced beyond what it does, but that’s not likely to be
a problem, either.
Conclusion
|
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CHAPTER 9
Internationalization
David Duffett
English? Who needs to spend time learning that? I’m never going to England!
—Dan Castellaneta
Telephony is one of those areas of life where, whether at home or at work, people do
not like surprises. When people use phones, anything outside of the norm is an
expectation not met, and as someone who is probably in the business of supplying
telephone systems, you will know that expectations going unmet can lead to untold
misery in terms of the extra work, lost money, and other problems that are associated
with customer dissatisfaction.
In addition to ensuring that the user experience is in keeping with what users expect,
there is also the need to make your Asterisk feel “at home.” For example, if an out‐
bound call is placed over an analog line (FXO), Asterisk will need to interpret the
tones that it “hears” on the line (busy, ringing, etc.).
By default (and maybe as one might expect, since it was “born in the USA”), Asterisk
is configured to work within North America. However, since Asterisk gets deployed
in many places and (thankfully) people from all over the world make contributions to
it, it is quite possible to tune Asterisk for correct operation just about anywhere you
choose to deploy it.
If you have been reading this book from the beginning, chapter by chapter, you will
have already made some choices during installation and in the initial configuration
that will have set up your Asterisk to work in your local area (and live up to your
customers’ expectations).
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Quite a few of the chapters in this book contain information that will help you inter‐
nationalize1 or (perhaps more properly) localize your Asterisk implementation. The
purpose of this chapter is to provide a single place where all aspects of the changes
that need to be made to your Asterisk-based telephone system in this context can be
referenced, discussed, and explained. The reason for using the phrase “Asterisk-based
telephone system” rather than just “Asterisk” is that some of the changes will need to
be made in other parts of the system (IP phones, ATAs, etc.), while other changes will
be implemented within Asterisk and DAHDI configuration files.
Let’s start by getting a list together (in no particular order) of the things that may
need to be changed in order to optimize your Asterisk-based telephone system for a
given location outside of North America. You can shout some out if you like…
• Language/accent of the prompts
• Physical connectorization for PSTN interfaces (FXO, BRI, PRI)
• Tones heard by users of IP phones and/or ATAs
• Caller ID format sent and/or received by analog interfaces
• Tones for analog interfaces to be supplied or detected by Asterisk
• Format of time/date stamps for voicemail
• The way the above time/date stamps are announced by Asterisk
• Patterns within the dialplan (of IP phones, ATAs, and Asterisk itself if you are
using the sample dialplan)
• The way to indicate to an analog device that voicemail is waiting (MWI)
• Tones supplied to callers by Asterisk (these come into play once a user is “inside”
the system; e.g., the tones heard during a call transfer)
We’ll cover everything in this list, adopting a strategy of working from the outer edge
of the system toward the very core (Asterisk itself). We will conclude with a handy
checklist of what you may need to change and where to change it.
Although the principles discussed in this chapter will allow you to adapt your Aster‐
isk installation specifically for your region (or that of your customer), for the sake of
consistency, all of our examples will focus on how to adapt Asterisk for one region:
the United Kingdom.
1 i18n is a term used to abbreviate the word internationalization, due to its length. The format is <first_let‐
ter><number><last_letter>, where <number> is the number of letters between the first and last letters. Other
words, such as localization (L10n) and modularization (m12n), have also found a home with this scheme,
which Leif finds a little bit ridiculous. More information can be found in the W3C glossary online.
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