Direct dial for parent company

I hope I can explain this sufficiently … please bear with me.

Our parent company is running a different system on a different network in a different city (we were recently acquired). They want to pick up their phone and dial i.e. “5” and then one of our extensions, and connect to us without having to dial our 10-digit inbound line and then an extension. Is this possible? Can someone point me in the right direction?

We’re running current FreePBX. I believe they’re on a Cisco system.

Does their Cisco system support SIP?

If so, do you have credentials to send/receive calls through it using the SIP protocol ?

If you have the both, you will need to know their dial plan in and out, i you have all the above, then Yes you can!

To be sure - almost all of the configuration is going to be on their Cisco System.

You should be able to set up a trunk from the Cisco to you. Authenticate by IP Address (to keep it simple and secure) assuming you have a fixed IP address.

On the FreePBX system, allow their server access through the firewall.
Authenticate by their IP address.
Set the Inbound Route context to “from-internal” and have them send “just” the extension number (not the 5).

On their system, (and you’ll need to rely on them for this) set up a SIP trunk where the ‘5’ prefix causes the trunk to connect to your IP address through the normal SIP process. Have them strip the ‘5’ before they send the number to you (only send the extension).

One possible weirdness: if they allow “anything that starts with ‘5’” to be sent to your PBX, whatever they dial will show up in your system “as if” they were calling from an extension, so ‘5911’ would call ‘911’ from your PBX. Probably not the actual goal. 5-555-1234567 would call 555-1234567 from your PBX and connect it to their phone.

That should get you started. Setting up the trunks is covered in detail in our Wiki, and I’m pretty sure Cisco has documentation on connecting a CUCM system to a SIP Service.

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THANK YOU! This advice gets me started in the right direction. :slight_smile:

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