After returning home, I asked several people why my phone company could not simply play a message to warn callers when my time zone changes by more than four or five hours, letting them know the call might be inconvenient. Nobody could come up with a technical reason, but we all suspected it was because the mobile phone company to which I subscribed charged several dollars per minute to connect calls.

 

As part of the process of attaching a GSM phone to a network, the home network needs to learn where the phone is visiting, and that information conceivably could include a time zone. I returned to my idea once I started using Asterisk, because it provides an extensive toolkit for designing PBX-hosted services. Anything that can be coded in a computer can become an Asterisk service.

 

After I understood the basics of Asterisk, I sat down to implement a feature that kept track of the time of day where I visited and prevented calls from coming in at inconvenient times. The system I built on top of Asterisk to handle this feature has two major parts. The key to the system is maintaining a time-zone offset from the time in London.

 

(My code implements offsets only of whole hours, though it could be extended to use either half or quarter hours.) When a device first connects to Asterisk, its IP address is used to guess the location and, therefore, the time offset. After the offset is programmed into the system, incoming calls are then checked against the time at the remote location. Before the phone is allowed to ring, the time at the remote location is checked, and callers can be warned if they are trying to complete a call at an inconvenient time.

 

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