T46S Multicast from FreePBX

[Mike742]

Greetings ~

We're actually implementing T46S, T40G and one form of T19 to replace our expensive as all-get-out Cisco system. Yealink works wonderfully as a phone and we like the multicast ability for various levels of campus-wide or focused alerts.

What we'd like to do, rather than use the Yealink multicast to broadcast, is use FreePBX - dial a number from select phones around the campus (which is controlled by FreePBX) and send a broadcast.

I'll include details on our setup below. But our issue: When we dial the FreePBX configured extension, the page goes out... including the phone we're calling from. We wanted all phones to play the broadcast, regardless of what's going on. DND and being currently on a call should not block these broadcasts. But being the one that called the extension to make an emergency announcement should.

One solution would be to make certain phones not participate in the multicast, but we'd like the call to go to every available (as in, on) phone in the case of an emergency.

* The T46S (which will be the bulk of our phones) use FW 66.83.0.10.
* Broadcast 224.0.36.X:XXXXX
* PBXact 14.0.2.14
** Paging and Intercom 13.0.26.5
* Asterisk 13.19.1

I believe when we looked at Paging Pro, their was a limit to how many phones one could page to at a time.

Any ideas? The key things are to be able to broadcast to all phones or just certain buildings and have some control over which phones we can broadcast from. Multicast makes sense, but we need the broadcaster to be able to talk, and not have their phone just listening to the multicast. =)

-Mike

[jolouis]

(04-06-2018 04:58 PM)Mike742 Wrote:  DND and being currently on a call should not block these broadcasts.

That is the tricky part of what you're trying to do. You basically want paging to override everything, but of course if you say that, how does the calling phone know that you are using it to page, and not just on a call to somebody else that should be over-ridden.

When you do the multicast from the phone itself the phone can tell, because you have triggered the multicast from it. When you just dial an extension on FreePBX though the phone has no way to know that it is triggering the multi-cast...

What is the actual reason for having FreePBX do the multicast instead of the phone directly? Without some special feature or support from Yealink (which seems unlikely since they would just say use the multicast on the phone itself) I don't see how you are going to make this work the way you are describing....