Hardware Conference bridge in local or remote site?

[samhopealpha]

Dear everybody,

This is the existing environment

- CUCM8.6 with a publisher and a subscriber (both are in local site)

- voice gateway with PVDM2-64 (local site)

- voice gateway with PVDM2-64 (remote site)

- G.729 will be used between local site and remote site

- hardware CFB have been created on both VoiceGateway and registered to CUCM

The question is

If I am going to create a meetMe conference, and the participants could be in local site or remote site

where should I create the Conference Host? (local site / remote site)?

or is there anything I should be aware? (like bandwidth?)

Thanks

Sam

[Chris Deren]

Sam,

Local conference bridge will be started for conferencing assuming proper MRGL assignment to the phone starting the conference. All other parties simply are bridged to this established conference bridge. Since G729 is used for the calls between the sites and assuming the conference bridge is assigned to proper DP forcing this region the calls will traverse the WAN as G729.

HTH,

Chris

[samhopealpha]

For the local site

- all IP phones are DP_local, and using MRGL_local with CFB_HW_local

For the remote site

- all IP phones are DP_remote, and using MRGL_remote with CFB_HW_remote

with the above situation, does it mean that

Starting the conference in local site or in remote site are same result/outcome?

Thanks

Sam

[Chris Deren]

Whoever starts the conference controls which conference bridge is started and all other participants simply join it. If user as site A initiates the conference, CUCM looks at the phone's DP/MRGL/MRG to select available conference bridge assigned to it, then all other users are joined to this bridge. If user at site B initiates the conference DP/MRGL/MRL/conference bridge at site B would be used.

HTH, please rate all useful posts!

Chris