Dial Plan Issues

[chad.lensert]

I'm in the porcess of planning a dial plan. I'de like to use toll-bypass to save on intra-state long distance costs. I want to do this by putting route patterns in that match the local and ECC calling areas for particular sites throughout the state, then if someone outside of that calling area makes a call to a local place in that area, it will go on-net, through the remote site's 3745 and out to the PSTN.

Will I have to put all local numbers into route patterns and select route lists, groups, etc. with them? We're planning on having 70+ sites rollout over the next couple of years, and having a site with 40+ local numbers for it can create quite a bit of data input. And on top of that., it will have to be double because I'll have to put a route in for local calls from local users (i.e. 555XXXX) and a matching pattern for those dialing the number long distance (.i.e. 1222555XXXX). Then I can do a 11/10>7 strip on it and dump it out PSTN of that site as if the call was local.

So, this is obviously going to be a huge task, adding all of these patterns and chaging them when they update, finding them, etc. Is there a better way to do this? I realize that toll-bypass isn't standardized so the setup can be complex, but I'm not looking forward to spending hours doing data entry.

Thanks for the help.

Chad

[dgoodwin]

Chad,

Yes you can do this, and you can do it the way you describe. However, if each site will have an H.323 gateway then I think this can best be accomplished by using a Gatekeeper.

That way you can configure all the various prefixes in different zones in the gatekeeper configuration, and just point route patterns with wildcards at the gatekeeper (through a Route List) and then let the gatekeeper figure out which gateway to send the call to.

[chad.lensert]

That's what I figured. Having a centralized CCM plan has a lot of caveats to it. This would also help for diffferent sites that dial the same prefix (i.e. 9221xxxx) that are local to their respective areas. I can see how a Gatekeeper would help to route calls instead of having to make multiple partitions and point identical destination patterns to different partitons based on the partition of the DN that the phone has assigned to it.

Thanks for the help.