Looking for some help with the Cisco 3PCC phones on FreePBX/Asterisk.
I’ve been having trouble getting the line keys to work the way I want them to. In our office we have a ring group for the all the different extensions and a ‘pickup’ line in the kitchen so if they’re over there they can pick up the phone. So far, I have only been able to implement this with the IVR, or if someone knows just to dial the ring group number. Everyone knows to just use the line keys.
I’ve only been able to get the line keys to function as a speed dial for the extension it is monitoring. I have messed with a few scripts for the line key, but I’ve never been able to get it to dial the ring group.
One thing I have found out after working with the 3PCC phones is for some reason the phones do NOT like to dial certain * number feature codes.
I have Cisco Enterprise phones (configured with SEPMAC files) mixed in with the 3PCC phones and I have no problems dialing all of the star feature codes in FreePBX with those, but for some reason the 3PCC phones balk at certain combos. This may be related to your problem.
I don’t use ring groups or pickup groups. Instead for groups that would be similar to a “ring group” I just log a second line button appearance on the phone into the same extension. chan_pjsip allows this if you raise the max contacts. It does not behave exactly like a traditional key system does (with the flashing button lights) but this is, after all, a PBX and not a key system.
After playing with this for a while I am assuming that this just doesn’t work on these phones with this firmware. I also find it impossible to do with the Polycom phones we have also.
I too have an old install of FreePBX at home that I have to play around with. I was able to get chan_sccp working pretty well and I was able to get the phones to do that where the lamp monitored the actual extension, but the button it self was a speed dial.
Have you been able to get conferencing and the other ‘special’ features working on your Enterprise firmware phones on FreePBX? This is something I would love to be able to do, but we use conferencing and call forwarding very frequently. So this is something we would like to have. The Enterprise firmware phones are a lot better in a lot of ways, but just not in getting them up and going. Go figure haha
We don’t implement ring groups or pickup like this but I tested BLF and speed dials out from 3PCC phones in our phone test lab.
This has been discussed here before, ring groups came about on Asterisk because the chan_sip driver could not handle more than 1 phone registered into 1 extension number. But chan_pjsip can do this so instead of the traditional ring group, what I do for these kinds of groups is I designate an extension as a group and then set it up as a second line appearance on the 3PCC phones in that group and raise the max contact for chan_pjsip on that extension. When a call comes into that group extension all phones ring and whoever answers it seizes the call. Functionally it’s the same as a ring group.
If your phone system is not that large and you have many Cisco Enterprise phones then I would advise that you compile your own Asterisk version and apply the USECALLMANAGER patch. This brings a modernized chan_sip back into Asterisk. You can then override the Asterisk version number in FreePBX 17 so that all of the chan_sip menus come back so you can use the GUI to configure the phones. Then you can use the Cisco Enterprise phones the way they were designed to be used with multiple call appearance buttons and all the rest of it.
The main reason I use the Sangoma-compiled Asterisk binary is so that if I ever need to buy a support pack then if I do and end up using it, then Sangoma support won’t blame my compiled version. I wanted that extra insurance. But, I’ve never had to buy a support pack. So I am sort of planning for something I’m never going to use which I guess is stupid. LOL. I have 80 extensions under FreePBX now with plans to ultimately expand it to 400 when our older Cisco UCM is finally retired. Right now the 2 systems coexist, uneasily. They are all fed by a single PRI trunk.
What I’ve come to understand is with an enterprise like mine we are in the absolute worst possible spot for telephony. 400 extensions is far too large to go to the cloud. Not only would the subscription fees eat us alive, the worst thing about the cloud is all the sudden every single extension is now running the money meter so people start freaking out about usage reports and the rest of it. Plus the resiliency of having that many phones maintain registration over your Internet connection is very low. We would have to put a lot of money into much bigger Internet pipes and would spend half the day hanging on the 800 support line. However, 400 extensions is too small to justify hiring a permanent position. If I have 3000 extensions under management, I could bring in an IT candidate and tell them “I don’t care how many Cisco certifications you have in UCM, we are never going to do that so do NOT think if you are hired here your going to be able to change our mind in the future and force us to get rid of Asterisk. Instead, you are going to eat sleep and breathe FreePBX and become an expert in it” And, unfortunately, FreePBX and Asterisk is way too reliable for a telephone consultant to make a living with unless they can get a LOT of clients so I can’t find a consultant who is willing to come in the door every 6 months or so and get their head back into the system to solve 1 thing then begone for another 6 months. Telephone consultants like messy phone systems that spazz out all the time and keep them constantly busy bandaiding, like a Panasonic or Mitel system or NEC. Their favorite systems are the Northern Telecom Meridian and hybrid key systems at least around here. They love those things since the manufacturer went belly up and everything having to do with them is custom and arcane.
So for better or for worse the phone system is never going to leave my plate, at least where I work it won’t. If I was smart I would say to hell with the Sangoma compiled binary and just use the USECALLMANAGER patch and the Cisco Enterprise phones and accept that I’ll never be able to farm out the work on the system to someone else. But I still have a vision that I can make it work with the “anointed version” of Asterisk from Sangoma and 3PCC phones, so I’m still putting effort into that space.
This is a highly inaccurate statement. First, hunt groups/ring groups existed in TDM PBX systems well before VoIP or Asterisk was even created. Second, there’s nothing in Asterisk that gives you a “ring group”, you have to build that logic yourself in the dialplan. Otherwise all the ring group ends up being is a Dial() with a lot of endpoints/peers in it. Finally, Asterisk is tech agnostic when it comes to this. You got chan_iax2, chan_dahdi, chan_alsa, chan_local, chan_sip (legacy), chan_pjsip, etc, etc. Any of those can end up in a ring group.
chan_sip only allowing one registered contact was not the reason that ring groups exist in Asterisk since they could exist for non-chan_sip endpoints who also can’t have more than one device attached to them at a time.
The amount of contacts a single endpoint/peer can have has no relation to the concepts of hunt groups/ring groups since those concepts existed before SIP and having multiple contacts. A ring group is more than just “ring all members simultaneously”.