Just remembered an edge case from when I went away on holiday and staff were unable to make any calls due to the Sipgate account not having any credit and their auto top up script wasn’t working! I was not popular.
Is there any way FreePBX could have fallen back to the regular PSTN? FreePBX is connected to both Sipgate and the PSTN at the moment, but given that Sipgate plays a message to the caller saying “sorry buster, you’re outta credit”, I’m not sure FreePBX would detect that as congestion.
oh really? Thanks. I’ll do that then. I thought that wouldn’t work because the call to Sipgate ‘works’ in some sense, because Sipgate play a sound file to say “no credit available”. But if FreePBX is smart enough to register even that as a fail, then great!
There is a mechanism in SIP called “early media” which allows media (i.e. audio) to be streamed to the endpoint BEFORE the channel is answered. If they’re using early media for the warning then I would expect your alternate backup trunks to work. If they are not, then I would touch with the provider and ask how to configure for this very common scenario.
Ideally I’d have added this comment on to the end of this but the topic has been automatically closed. A shame.
Anyway, just to say that I’ve approaced Sipgate and bizarrely they don’t use early media and it’s no wonder that the calls aren’t automatically failing gracefully to the next trunk, the call’s failure due to lack of funds appears in the CDR records as just “BUSY”.
