Distributed MOH

[calmichael]

A client that we are working with has an investment of having a music on hold source at each of their retail locations. The client would like to maintain that architecture. The music on hold source is regionalized and contains some dynamic content (e.g. local weather and events) which prevents us from using the remote gateway to store the MOH file local to the site. Has anyone seen or engineered a solution to allow for multiple distributed MOH feeds in a CUCM environment? Thanks.

[CHRIS CHARLEBOIS]

I understand it is possible, although I'm never done it myself, to connect an external audio source to an E&M voice port on a Cisco Voice Gateway and use that gateway to multicast that audio stream onto the local subnet. That's at least a place to start.

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

Another option is to use an external IP-based source and have it multicast on the same address as the UC Manager stream. I believe some satellite radio receivers are capable of this.

There is also a company called SynApps that makes a unicast to multicast relay that works with their paging product SA-Announce. It was originally intended for environments that did not have multicast-enabled WANs. The relay has a local audio input as well and SynApps has been intending to add support to multicast that audio input directly from the relay. They are pretty responsive so if you have a specific opportunity I suspect they will give you details on how fast they can get that finished. http://syn-apps.net