MGCP or H323/SIP gateway?

[oldcreek12]

Hi, I am setting up a new branch office where we will use a C2901 with PRI for PSTN connectivity for inbound dialing and SIP for outbound dialing, I plan to let phones in remote office to register to corp CUCM, each phone will have a local DID number. One obstacle I am facing is that the DID numbers we got from T1 PRI provider can not easily be stripped and mapped to internal directory numbers we set aside for the remote office(because conflicting with exsiting internal DNs), If I control the PRI via MGCP, as far as I understand, CUCM seems to only allow me to select the number of digits from the dialed number from PRI to keep. I am thinking to run SIP between corp CUCM and C2901, with C2901 IOS's powerful translation profile I can have much more flexibility to manipulate dialed digits. Will that work? or if I use MGCP, on CUCM can I have other way to manipulate more complicated dialed digits?

Thanks!

[magutowski]

Hi  -

As the others have noted, stay away from MGCP for your branch offices.  It adds a layer of complexity and flakeyness that you don't need.  Just yesterday we had a major outage due to MGCP's inability to fail-over from one subscriber to another (still trying to find root cause).  H.323, in my opinion is the most stable of all for remote branch gateways.

While H323/SIP will allow you more control of digit manipulation at the gateway layer, I don't think you want or need it there.  Yes, translation profiles can indeed be powerful, but I think for maintenance purposes you can and should do them in CUCM.  You don't want to have to go into IOS each time you add a new phone at the site, for example.  Also, be mindful of the limitations with voice translation profiles.  I believe you can have 128 rules, but only 15 translations per rule.  That's bitten me before and forced me into NUM-EXPs.  You may be able to use them, or simply prefix all inbound DIDs that come from the PRI with a unique code such as "*123" before passing along to CUCM.  CUCM would then apply an appropriate translation pattern, unique to that site.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Mark

[Amit23]

Hi Dear....

you cna use H.323 and it is best way for this setup and easily for configuration part.

and also for the troubleshooting part....

for this use you cna later easily handle the setup if faicng nay issue someitme...