H323 Support on CM

[mamoss]

Dave,

We have heard that Cisco may have announced that the support for H323 gateways on CM is being dropped.

Obviously its hard to believe because the only remaining option would be to use a 6000 8-E1 card using skinny.

We think it maybe that modem support via H323 is not supported anymore (we have had problems with this that were resolved by using 6000 cards).

Do you know of any announcement that makes sense of this?

thanks.

[dgoodwin]

I am not sure what announcement you are referring to, as I have not seen anything to this effect.

One thing that is happening with the release of Cisco CallManager 3.1 is expanded MGCP support. In that release, the only gateways I know of that will still use Skinny are the AT-x and AS-x gateways, which are not too common anymore. The Cat6k and Cat4k voice cards will use MGCP to talk to CallManager, same for the VG200, 2600, 3600, 4224, and hopefully more IOS gateways soon.

Note that none of this has anything to do with H.323 support in CallManager. It is still supported, and still works pretty much the same way.

[8dgoswick]

Will the MGCP support for CCM 3.1 include the multiflex trunk cards for ISDN-PRI used in a 2600 or 4224? So far it's been limited to FXO and FXS modules.

[dgoodwin]

I can't say at this time exactly which telephone signaling protocols will be supported with which MGCP gateways.

But yes, MGCP support in CallManager 3.1 has been expanded to support some digital interfaces. I think many of the commonly desired configurations will work. For example:

6608-T1 - PRI, CAS

6608-E1 - PRI

VG200 - FXO, FXS, T1-PRI, T1-CAS, E1-PRI

2600 - same

3600 - same

Note that there is more than one piece to this puzzle; CallManager 3.1 supports the primitives to handle MGCP analog FXO/FXS, T1 CAS, PRI, PRI backhaul, etc.

But the CCMAdmin GUI has to be programmed to work with each of the gateways since it needs to know the slot layouts, etc.

And the software on the gateway needs to support these various methods. So the first IOS platform to support the above is the VG200, and there will be a specific IOS version where doing the above is supported with CallManager 3.1. Then the 2600 and 3600 IOS will have these required features in a certain version of IOS, and so on.