As I create a new page group and drag extensions into it, the max number of extensions seems to be 40 although there is no documentation to suggest this. Can anyone confirm?
Asterisk 11.3
Freepbx 2.11.0.1
I would not recommend more then 40 devices but yes you can change that limit in the Advanced Settings module in FreePBX
I can comment on the limit of 40 extensions in the FreePBX GUI, but I can comment on trying to page that many extensions.
You will probably have problems trying to page that many extensions and here is why.
When you page an extension Asterisk has to setup a call to that extension. When you page multiple extensions Asterisk has to setup a call to every extension you are paging. The problem is that when you try to setup that many calls in a very short amount of time there is a possibility that all the calls will not be setup in time. The result will be that some of the extensions will not receive all the audio stream.
Multicast paging is supported on many phones and I think will fix this problem.
So if the default limit of 40 is the recommended limit, what is the suggested route if we’d want to page more than 40 extensions? I know alan_mousty mentioned something about multicast? How would this work and what would it look like to set it up? We are needing to page all phones in the district at any given time (emergency, etc). Thoughts?? Thanks…
Nathan
I will say this. We are preparing to make the paging module work in multicast mode. When that will be released is unknown at this time.
To read about multicast skip around inside this article for more information: http://nerdvittles.com/?p=6443
A math problem, 40 x 80kbs for ulaw will often hurt your network . all your phone x 80kbs more so, multicast is 1 x 80k.