Ring Groups - Simultaneous Call Limit Reached

[gdi2k]

FreePBX 14.0.5.25 / Asterisk 13.22.0 from official Distro.

Up until now we have had one FreePBX installation in one location. When we added a second location, we had extensions in the second location connect to FreePBX in the first via VPN. It has worked fine, but it doesn’t provide any redundancy should something happen to the first location (an internet connection failure at the first location would take down both locations completely).

We’re experimenting with hosting “main” FreePBX installations in the cloud that host our ring groups / call queues and then distribute calls among the two locations, each of which with its own FreePBX install and local extensions. Given that remote extensions can be added by adding # to the extension number, like 1234# I thought this would not be an issue.

But in practice during testing we have found that when a certain number of remote extensions are added to a ring group, we get “I’m sorry your simultaneous call limit reached. Goodbye”. This also seems to apply to queues.

I am aware of the per-extension settings relating to max simultaneous call limits (defaults to 3), but I would prefer not to have to increase this setting to 20+ for every single extension we have.

Are there other options to work around this?

[gdi2k]

Update: I got the Google-fu rolling and was able to dig up this pertinent thread:

Number of external numbers in ring group gets matched against Outbound Concurrency Limit

Just found out that if you have several external numbers in a ring group, the total number of those get matched against the Outbound Concurrency Limit of the extension you call the ring group from. In other words, if the Outbound Concurrency Limit of your extension is 3, and you have 4 external numbers in the ring group you are calling, you will get a “your simultaneous call limit has been reached” message and the call will fail. Now that doesn’t look right to me. Is that a bug?

The answer is, according to the thread, that external ring group extensions do count against an extension’s concurrency limit, and that is acceptable.

So we’ll have to live with it. I was able to bulk change all our existing extensions using the Admin → Bulk Handler (export CSV, modify all the extensions in Excel, then import again). Two minute job.

The default for new extensions can be set under Settings → Advanced → Dialplan and Operational → Extension Concurrency Limit.