I recently figured out how I can see the inbound caller ID after a call gets transferred. (The trustrpid and sendrpid settings needed to be tweaked).
Then I figured out how I can show which inbound trunk a call came in on. (Using CID name prefix on an inbound route).
Now here is the last piece of the puzzle for me: when somebody call outside office hours they can use the service number and choose to be connected to one of our employees’ mobile phones. Currently our employees see the phone number of our company when this happens. We’d like to see the number of the customer calling, if possible with some some CID name prefix.
How do we pull this off?
The default behavior in FreePBX is to pass the original caller ID of who made the inbound call. Are you sure your carrier allows you to send any caller ID you want.
As @tonyclewis pointed out, your carrier may override the caller id of any call that goes out to match the ID of the line they sold you. Check with them to make sure exactly what is happening.
If they are, you could do what I did and contract with a second provider specifically for the purpose of sending calls to the company cell phones. This account is set up with no Caller ID (which is why I got it) and the provider has no restrictions on what Caller ID I send. I route all of the calls for our important cell phone numbers out to that carrier so that I can control what information get transmitted to the people in the company.
Thanks for the response. I looked into it a bit more and today I stumbled into the “Outbound CallerID” and “CID Options” under the Connectivity -> Trunks -> our main trunk. The Outbound CallerID is set to the number I see on our employees’ mobile phones. When I removed it and tried to submit it gave me a warning that it may cause “undefined behaviour” and suggested using the CID Options. I canceled the changes. The CID Options are set to “Allow Any CID”.
Can this information help you in helping me?
Yes we recommend setting a caller ID on the trunk but with it set to allow any cid it will use the CID that is passed not the one in the trunk. Sounds like to me your carrier is not sending what you send.
Watch the asterisk CLI and see what it shows is being set for caller ID when u test a call.
I have an account at Alcazar Networks specifically for this kind of redirection. They honor whatever CID I send and they’re dirt cheap for outbound only. I set up all of the cell phones in the company in an outbound route so that they are “serviced” through the Alcazar connection instead of my “normal” VOIP connection. It also avoids a lot of firewall strangeness and RTP issues.
Thank you for your responses! This clarifies the situation a lot.
I contacted the ISP, they’ll get back to me soon. I’m curious what they have to say…
I’ll keep you posted.
I have a response: “Unfortunately, when forwarding, you can not enter a different number that is not [my provider] because voip account logs in with username, password and phone number and external numbers can not be included here.” It sounds a bit like they don’t understand or take me seriously, but I guess this is it.
Well, too bad. Thanks for all your help anyways!
There are plenty of providers that will work with you on this Sangoma’s own VOIP provider, Alcazar Networks, and VOIP Innovations are three that I recommend. There are lots of others out there - you don’t need a number, so all you want is “outbound” service.
Thank you very much for your consideration, but I don’t think I can convince my employer to get a new outbound service, especially since I still don’t fully understand what I’m doing. Besides, I have no idea if any of the providers where our company is located (Netherlands) support this.
I’m not advocating changing providers. I’m suggesting adding another provider specifically that supports “foreign” caller IDs so that you can pass an inbound caller ID to an employee’s cell phone. It’s also a good practice to have a second outbound trunk just in case there’s a problem with the first one.
It’s easy to control (the only calls that go out on the server are the ones to the employees) and outbound service is usually reasonably inexpensive. Most of the clients I set this up for pay less then $10 a month for the few times a month they need to forward a call out to an employee’s cell phone.