[VoiceOps] Help Requested: E.123 Intl Formatting in Google libphonenumber

[Henning Westerholt]

Hello,

as usual the problem with standards is that there are many of them.

I can not comment about other countries, but even in Germany it's a bit messier as you described.

Most people in the telco world use E.164 or E.123 type for formatting to represent phone numbers.
But many normal businesses use the national standard "DIN 5008". This extends E.123 with the usage of a dash to separate local extensions in international format, e.g.:

+49 123 123456-123

Many people recommend this format if the company is doing business mainly national, and E.123 if the company is doing business international.

Cheers,

Henning

-----Original Message-----
From: VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org> On Behalf Of Peter Beckman
Sent: Wednesday, March 2, 2022 8:56 PM
To: VoiceOps <voiceops at voiceops.org>
Subject: [VoiceOps] Help Requested: E.123 Intl Formatting in Google libphonenumber

Hey all --

I hope and trust that most of you are fans of standards.

I need some help convincing Google's libphonenumber team to follow the published ITU E.123 Number Formatting standard for +1 NANPA, Ecuador, and Argentina.

tl;dr -- Please comment in support here:

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/221095104


Long Version:

I love standards. They are often unambiguous and organize all of us around a common understanding of how we are going to interoperate. Everything we do in our daily work can be tied back to a standard:

     - TCP/IP, hell the whole OSI Model
     - SIP, RTP
     - ITU E.164, E.123, SS7, ISDN, DSL
     - DNS, Email, TLS/SSL

It seems weird that an International company like Google, who practically exists ONLY BECAUSE these standards existed for Google to emerge from, is being picky about implementing a phone number formatting standard published in 2008.

The crux:
     168 countries use spaces in their International Format
       2 countries outside of +1 NANPA, Ecuador and Argentina have dashes
      25 countries in +1 NANPA all use +1 NPA-NXX-XXXX as the International
           Format

ITU E.123 states in 9.1:

     Only spaces should be used in an international number.

Thus the correct output would be '+1 NPA NXX XXXX' for the INTERNATIONAL format.

I'm all for using (NPA) NXX-XXXX or NPA-NXX-XXXX for any of the other formats.

I'm just trying to get support from the community to get rid of Dashes entirely in the INTERNATIONAL Format of phone numbers.

Your support and comment is appreciated.

Beckman
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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman at angryox.com                                https://www.angryox.com/
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