Back in June 2022 I wrote about the various ways that you can restrict where a user can call. That post has led to a couple of conversations, so I wanted to come back to this topic and revisit things, especially one significant gotcha.

To summarize, there are two places that you can restrict where users can call. The first is with your carrier, the second is configuration within Teams. These hold true for Operator Connect, Calling Plans, and Direct Routing. My March post covered Direct Routing nicely, and Operator Connect is even more basic. The spot where confusion can come into the picture is with Calling Plans.

With Calling Plans, Microsoft is your carrier. My statement above of “The first [places where you can restrict calling] is with your carrier” for Calling Plans is your calling plan license:

With a “Domestic Calling Plan”, you can call your own country/region. Note that for the US and Canada, they’re treated as the same region. Calls from the US to Canada are included in the Domestic Calling Plan, and vice versa.

With a “Domestic and International Calling Plan”, you can call your own country/region and many/most other countries. There are a few exceptions for premium (read: expensive because of connectivity) or unfriendly territories.

With a “Pay-as-you-go calling plan”, your ability to restrict things is the same as the Domestic and International Plan. The difference here is that you’re paying a per-minute charge instead of the “per user per month” minute allotment.

Now what about Teams configuration? Well, under each user in Teams Admin Center, there is this:

And it’s super confusing because it says it’s for calling, but there’s an option of “In the country or region as the organizer”. That makes it sound like this drop-down is perhaps for outbound calling for meetings.

Well guess what? It’s for both! For a phone call, the organizer is the person placing the call. For a meeting, the organizer is the person who sent out the invite.

Okay cool, but there’s more, especially for the US/Canada folks. If you apply the “In the same country or region…” setting, a calling plan user will only be able to make calls within their own country. That doesn’t line up with Domestic Calling Plan, which bundles the US and Canada together. I had a conversation with one person who reported that they had issues placing toll free calls with this restriction in place, but I’ve been unable to duplicate their findings. Perhaps that was a bug that has been worked out, either in Teams or at the or the toll-free provider’s system.

Microsoft does mention this on learn.microsoft.com: