Purpose

The Local channel construct can be used to establish dialing into any part of the dialplan.

Imagine you have a TE410P in your box. You want to do something for which you must use a Dial statement (for instance when dropping files in /var/spool/outgoing) but you do want to be able to use your dialplans least-cost-routes or other intelligent stuff. What you could do before we had chan_local was create a cross-link between two ports of the TE410P and then Dial out one port and in the other. This way you could control where the call was going.

Of course, this was a nasty hack, and to make it more sensible, chan_local was built.

The "Local" channel driver allows you to convert an arbitrary extension into a channel. It is used in a variety of places, including agents, etc.

This also allows us to hop to contexts like a GoSub routine; See examples below.