Translating nothing into nothing…

Wanna confuse a just-starting-out voice engineer quickly? Just show them voice translation rules. Seemingly simple on the surface, black magic voodoo underneath.  At least it can seem that way to someone new to voice…

The most recent dark magic I learned to perform came about on an issue I was 90% sure was a carrier issue – I like to hold out a 10% chance that the carrier actually did get it right, it’s only fair.

So a user reports that international calls to Great Britain are failing- no other international calls are failing, just those.  Now, I don’t know about your users, but mine *often* have trouble even figuring out the digits to dial to make a long distance call, so my confidence in them being able to accurately enter an international access code is low. Okay, non-existent.

So we fire up the good ole “debug isdn q931” and to my surprise the user is actually right. Surprise being the appropriate emotion since, let’s face it, that doesn’t happen everyday.  I take a capture of the call failure to Great Britain and a capture of the successful international call and conclude that the carrier must be goofing something up somewhere.

Now, I’m really not a blame-it-on-the-other-guy type of gal, but come on- the dial strings are hitting the same route pattern, sent to the same gateway, to the same dial-peer, and out the same voice port.  And only Great Britain numbers fail – thinking it’s not likely my system- seeing that there’s equal treatment to all things international on this end. I reasonably conclude the carrier switch must have some super special, surely unintentional, non-routing going on.

Arming the user with debugs, I send him on his way to confront the carrier with the proof of their Anglophobic ways. That’s when I learn I have overlooked something significant in the debugs- something the lovely carrier technician pointed out – likely with a smirk on his I-know-I’m-right face.

The q931 debugs showed the “type” for the Great Britain calls being marked with type as “International” whereas the calls for other international destinations were being marked with type of  “Unknown.”  Why is this significant?  Well, the “International” designation when received by a carrier switch causes that switch to prepend a 011 to the dialed string.  In this case, it’s extremely detrimental since 011 was already part of the digits placed on the line.

There are many ways to fix this issue, the one I liked best as you may have guessed, involves a translation pattern and was suggested by one of my brilliant coworkers.

It goes like this:

voice translation-rule 1
  rule 1 // // type any unknown plan any unknown

This rule will take anything that hits it, change any “type” to Unknown and any “plan” to Unknown.

It then needs to be added to a translation profile that will catch the called number:

voice translation-profile SET_UNKNOWN
  translate called 1

This then gets applied to the outgoing international dial peer:

dial-peer voice 10000 pots
translation-profile outgoing SET_UNKNOWN
destination-pattern 9011T
prefix 011
port 0/0/0:23

And there you have it.  Calls to the Queen Mother can now commence and users can rejoice!

In case you are still reading this and are interested in the debugs, here are some pertinent excerpts:

From the unsuccessful call (X’s added to protect calling/called parties): Note, Plan:ISDN, Type: International

Bearer Capability i = 0x8090A2
Standard = CCITT
Transfer Capability = Speech
Transfer Mode = Circuit
Transfer Rate = 64 kbit/s
Channel ID i = 0xA98396
Exclusive, Channel 22
Calling Party Number i = 0x2181, ‘XXXXXX3547’
Plan:ISDN, Type:National
Called Party Number i = 0x91, ‘01144XX80212223’
Plan:ISDN, Type:International

From the successful call (X’s added to protect calling/called parties) – Note, Plan: Unknown, Type:Unknown:

Bearer Capability i = 0x8090A2
Standard = CCITT
Transfer Capability = Speech
Transfer Mode = Circuit
Transfer Rate = 64 kbit/s
Channel ID i = 0xA98395
Exclusive, Channel 21
Calling Party Number i = 0x2181, ‘XXXXXX3547’
Plan:ISDN, Type:National
Called Party Number i = 0x80, ‘01133XX2087574’
Plan:Unknown, Type:Unknown