IP softphones - Force to use certain trunks?

[J1121]

I'm on CM 5.2.1. I heard CM 6 has a 'location' field on the station form now that lets you easily tell the phones in a certain location to use certain trunks (for example the trunks physically connected to the media gateway in that remote location) rather than the trunks at the main server's site when a softphone makes a call. First of all, is that true what I mentioned about Cm 6?

With CM 5.2.1, is there any reasonably effective way (and administratively reasonably) to force softphones for users based at a certain remote office to only use their own media gateway's trunks when they place a call?

 

[latitude12]

You're correct, CM6 has a location field in the station form to tie a station to a particular location. You can then use location-based ARS to control the trunks used for outgoing calls.

Prior to CM6 you can use the IP network map - this defines the network region of an IP endpoint which in turn defines the location. This works perfectly well, but you need multi-national locations to be enabled.

Aside from that there are other methods, e.g. put the softphone users in another COR and use ARS partitions or different FRLs to control trunk access, or use a dedicated CLAN for softphone registration. Whether those methods are 'administratively reasonable' or not will depend on the size of your system and the current config.

 

[J1121]

Thanks. What's the requirement for the multinational locations? Why is that needed? I see it's disabled on our system but it does let you enter info in the ip-network-map screens.

Also it does work when I configure it. I made sure the network region in question had the correct location assigned to it and when I dialed the call in the softphone, it used that location's ARS to dial out

 

[latitude12]

TBH requiring multi-national locations was a mistake on my part, I just checked the manual before posting to see if there were any pre-reqs and mis-read the note. Glad to hear it's working for you.