Need to stop a multicast page when another one starts

I’ve got a school that wants to stop a multicast page when another one starts. The scenario is they’re playing a recorded lockdown page but the situation escalated rapidly and instead of waiting for the long lockdown message to finish (up to 80 seconds - message repeats several times to make sure it is heard in loud classrooms, gyms, playgrounds, etc.) they urgently need to play an intruder message.

Ideas?

How is the multicast paging being handled? Is it going through the PBX or straight from the phone?

From FreePBX. Once the number for the paging group is dialed, they can hang up and the message will play to completion.

Well, I’m going to guess you’ll need to call the active call source from the PBX. I haven’t done multicast in a long time but from what I recall, you need to kill it at the source. So if this was straight from the phone, the initiator of the page would have to end the call. Since this is coming from the PBX, you’ll need to kill the channel that started the page.

That doesn’t sound like something the user could decide to do themselves in the heat of the moment.

Not with out some extra development and customizing of the system, no.

Check if your multicast receivers support prioritization and use different multicast groups for different messages.

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This will work as well as long as all the devices support it.