Testing Inbound PSTN Connectivity Directly from Lync/Skype for Business

File this one under "It's obvious once you think about it for even a second"...

I was recently attempting to get a SIP trunk working to a new Sonus gateway located in Event Zero's head office in Brisbane, Australia.  I wanted to test inbound calls to the gateway by calling one of our response group workflows.

Normally, I would pick up my mobile or home phone and dial the number to test, but since I was dialing Australia, and I'm a cheap bastard, I didn't want to do that.  It was also the middle of the night in Australia, so I couldn't get someone local to do it for me.  If I dialed the number from Skype for Business, then it would do a reverse-number lookup, find an internal match and route me to the response group internally without going through the PSTN, which wouldn't achieve my goal.

My goal was to route a call to our Australian response group via Skype for Business via the PSTN in the easiest, laziest, least-expensive-to-my-own-wallet way possible (this is sounding like an exam question).  Pick one of the following answers:

1. Suck it up princess and eat the $2.05 it will cost to call Australia for a few seconds.
2. Wake up someone in Australia at 2 in the morning, claiming its an emergency.
3. Convince yourself that since outbound calls work fine, inbound should too.
4. Use a trunk translation rule to route a dummy phone number to the correct destination.
5. Give up and start drinking, because its Friday afternoon dammit!

The correct answer is #4 (although the judges will also accept #5).

If you've ever been at one of Doug Lawty's Enterprise Voice sessions at LyncConf or Ignite, you have probably seen his infamous diagram showing how a PSTN call works its way through the system.  To save you the pain, here the relevant details in a very small nutshell:

1. Dialed number gets normalized to E.164
2. Skype for Business does a reverse number lookup to see if there's an internal user or service that is assigned that number. 
3. If there's a match, routes the call internally directly to the user/service.
4. If there isn't an internal match, it finds a valid route through a PSTN trunk
5. It applies any outbound number translation to make the number conform to local standards and sends it on its merry way out the gateway to the PSTN.

Since reverse number lookup happens before handing off the call to the routing engine, we can simply call a dummy PSTN number of our choosing, and once it reaches the trunk translation rule stage, change that dummy number back to the proper number assigned to the Response Group workflow.

In the above example, all I do is create a trunk translation rule to change the non-existent North American phone number +1 (555) 999-0000, and translate it to the proper number.  Once the call has progressed to the point where outbound translation is happening, Skype for Business won't be doing another reverse number lookup, so it will continue to route that number out to the PSTN, at which point it should route to the correct destination (which could be right back where it came from). 

So, a simple solution to overcome my unwillingness to waste money on stuff I don't have to.