Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition

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 outbound 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’ ...