Telco Analog Hunting Lines

[J_Vansen_S]

hi All, 

We are in the process of upgrading a customer pbx from traditional PABX to UC. 

From my info gathering they mentioned that they have a public hotline(mainline) eg 9819100 that everyone calls into and used for outgoing calls. I believe it is a hunting group of numbers directly from the telco. Eg 1 mainline number with 8 underlining channels/analog lines. 

Please correct me on how i should transition this to our cisco voice gateway that has 8 FXO ports, as i am familiar with direct FXO lines only, eg per FXO line = per direct number. 

Do i configure it like a direct number and telco side will still do their hunting to the mainline out? 

Appreciate any advise

[Jaime Valencia · Accepted solution]

Telco controls the inbound call routing and hunting, you configure the outbound call routing and hunting of individual FXO ports.

[J_Vansen_S]

Thanks Jaime for the confirmation! Turns out the customer have a total of 12 or more hunting lines from the Telco our ISR voice gateway was not spec for such a capacity.
Do people normally upgrade to E1 for such setup moving on IP PBX

[Roger Kallberg]

Moving away from analog circuits would be a recommended action. To what is a question for what direction you want to take. Personally I would recommend you to look into using a SIP trunk connection instead of a digital ISDN (E1) as many Telco service providers are in the process of deprecating their legacy TDM last mile connections.

[J_Vansen_S]

Noted & agree on that. But unfortunately the Telcos in our country does not YET have SIP trunk service. So that would be out of the question.

At the mean time our customer is asking us for a justification of moving to E1, as it incur quite a high cost per month($1k++) vs FXO analog $10 per line