asterisk users - Mar 2004 - ext.conf for european variable length dialplan ?

Hello dialplan experts,

I am trying and browsing for days to find a solution for dialing out the 
variable length phone numbers in Europe. We have area codes between 2 
and 5 digits long and subscriber numbers between 4 and 8 digits making 
pattern matching a pain.


For IP phones something like

exten => _0.,1,Dial(Zap/g1/${EXTEN:1},,t)

works well because the entire number comes in one setup message.


For "classical" phones people dial one digit after the other, the
regex
matches after the first 0 and the outgoing ISDN channel starts dialing 
dropping the rest of the digits.

My Cisco ATA 186 implements a timeout and/or the # as an 'enter' key 
which would be kind of a second best solution but doesn't seem work with 
ISDN. (BTW: Did somebody get this to work???)

The best solution would be overlap dialing until the PSTN switch says 
'ringing' in the D-channel. Is this possible with zaptel channels?

May I ask what other european * users are using to handle this?

Thanks and regards,
Jan Baumann