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Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Ah, this is the opposite direction of what I thought: often "dial 9 to reach an outside line" systems end up triggering accidental calls to 911, especially since the person making the mistake just hangs up, in which case 911 is required to send a responder out.

That's not what this is about at all, but rather that "systems may not support direct 911 dialing, route 911 calls to the nearest 911 call center, or transmit accurate information on the caller’s location or call-back number." That is indeed a much more important issue!

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However the "dial 9" issue is still present. Esp. in an environment with "dial 1 for long distance" and a lot of long distance calling. I've always thought it would have been better to "dial 8" for an outside line. That way the first two numbers of a long distance call are not also the first two numbers of an emergency call (91).

Historically, often 9 was used for outside line, 8 was used for a tie-line call (intra-company). This originated in Step-by-Step PBX, where that 8 or 9 on the first selector would literally route you to a different signal path in the switch (to a connector that would hunt to an outgoing trunk). It carried over into early electronic PBXen, that were very limited in the size of their internal routing table, and the logic used to determine routing.

We have no excuse anymore not to be doing full translation dialing anymore - the technology is there and almost universal now.

Full translation means, you just dial the number and its the PBX figures out what you actually wanted - it just requires a little bit of planning - like, 3,4,5 or 7 digits for intra-company calls, 10 or 11 digits for external calls, no prefix or routing codes (like 9 or 8) - 911 can either be routed to an attendant/security or translated out directly.

I'm surprised corporate phones don't just have an "outside call" button built in, that transparently dials the magical incantation for you. No more mistakes - just lift, press the "I am going to make a phone call now" button, and then make the phone call.

Corps don't want to encourage (paid for) outside calls in many case?

This happens WAY too often at my workplace. Security has to check on it...happens once a week :/

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