I have just done a 150 phone install for a hospital. Half the phones are Aastra 6737i’s and half are 6731i’s. When we do an all page, which is not set to force or whisper, and is set to skip, the 6737i’s are working fine, but the 6731i’s are still getting the page come through and they are cutting off the calls.
Using latest stable FreePBX distro build with asterisk 1.8.11
150 phones is way too many for a unicast paging group.
Use the phones multicast paging.
Also those 6737i phones are going to give you hell. They are really buggy and still using a standalone Firmware. I would not use the 6735 or 6737 in my dog house and this is coming from the biggest Aastra fan boy in the world.
Yes Scott is right FreePBX paging is not setup to handle that many phones.
Lovely, it’s too late to backout now. Is Aastra working with larger installations to help us out at all with those phones? Do you have any suggestions on handling the 37’s?
On the multicast paging, are there any multicast addresses to avoid? other than ones that may be specific to our network. Any other gotcha’s?
If I had any hair, I would begin pulling it out now.
Also, so Asterisk paging isn’t capable of doing what older pbx’s have been doing forever with paging? There’s got to be a way to make this work server side. What is baffling me right now is why it is sending a page to phones that are busy if we have it set to skip?
The problem is IP. Remember their is a big difference with sending a single audio stream that and device can connect to like multicast and old digital systems versus asterisk having to call each phone and get the phone to answer than send it the audio. That is making 150 instant calls in asterisk all at the same time.
150 Call Setup calls in 1 second is not what Asterisk is designed to do. That is over 9000 calls a minute which would be tough for anything to handle on x86 hardware.
As far as Aastra I know they are working on new firmware but dont hold you breath for a few months.
Did you test the 37i phones yourself before you sold them. Have you used them in smaller setups. I would never send hardware to a new customer let alone a large install that has not been very tested in-depth ahead of time.
As far as why the phone is getting a page that is on a call. I have never seen that before but that is a FreePBX thing not Asterisk and it should not be. But you have provided very little info like logs of the call. Also what type of hardware is this on and how many processors and how much ram?
I have tested in a small environment and haven’t had problems, I don’t have the budget to test in a large environment.
The CPU is a core i5-560 dual core
4G DDR3 1333 RAM
I think I may have found the freepbx problem. One of my staff had turned on dynamically generate hints, which freepbx warns about because it I use device and user mode. I have very rarely had things work correctly when that is turned on. I will be doing more testing tomorrow to verify working correctly isn’t a fluke.