Transferring calls between offices

Chris Campbell · ‎03-08-2020

Hello,

I am new to voice, but have some experience with data and Cisco IOS.

I have a small business customer who has a main office with a non-Cisco PBX solution and is opening a branch office. The customer's telecom provider delivers voice service over fiber, which is provided as a POTS connection for phone service by an ONT. The two offices are served by the same telecom, but are in different rate centers. The customer would like to have the ability to transfer a call that comes into the main office to the branch office, and vice-versa. The current PBX system doesn't support this.

This should be technically possible, but I'm not sure what the name is for it, or if CUCM Express will support it.

Could someone help with the following questions?

1. Does CUCME support transferring a call that comes into one office to another?

2. What's this feature called?

3. What's involved in setting it up?

Thank you!

Vinod.s · ‎03-08-2020

Call transferring will support in cucm either by voip or pstn .

.

if you are making pstn transfer then its charges for you ...

But if you are making voip transfer then there iss no charge from isp but you have to check legality for this option.

Chris Campbell · ‎03-08-2020

I'll add a little detail:

Main office and branch office have a CUCME capable router. A site-to-site VPN is established between the two sites for data. Customer calls main office and needs to speak to an employee who is working at the branch office that day. Customer is asked to hold while call is transferred so that customer doesn't have to hang up and call a different number. The point of this is for customer convenience, not to avoid toll charges. I should have said switching center instead of rate center. I've already talked to the telecom company and they don't have any issue with this.

It looks like ITU H.450 defines the implementation of such services. Time for some reading...

TONY SMITH · ‎03-08-2020

How many phones does he have or need at each office? How many lines, and can you confirm the type of lines as well? I suspect they're analogue (as in you could plug an ordinary phone into them).

Personally I've not had good experience with analogue lines into either CME or CUCM gateways. Nowadays and especially for a business I'd be suggesting the customer moves either to a SIP service, which will be compatible with CME, or maybe to a hosted solution.

TONY SMITH · ‎03-08-2020

OK I missed your update. If you can get the calls into CME then transferring between your sites will be dead easy to set up. My concern about how the calls get into CME in the first place remains. I'd rather you used SIP if your carrier can do that.

You won't need to worry too much about the details of H.323 (and in fact it may make sense to use SIP for the site to site transfer in any case). You just set the two ends up with the same conventions, and the calls will work.

Chris Campbell · ‎03-08-2020

Thanks, Tony. I'll check to see if the phone company can do SIP. There's one thing that's not clear to me though. Assuming SIP isn't available and analog can be made to work, there are calls coming in to both offices on their respective analog POTS lines. There are two routers getting analog calls, each on its own FXO card. How is the inter- office handoff accomplished? The two routers probably have to know about each other and communicate, don't they? Or do the phones communicate with both routers, or both?

TONY SMITH · ‎03-08-2020

Hi, whether you get the calls into the two CMEs by SIP or as analogue, the call routing between offices will work the same. In principle you add a rule to each CME covering the number range for the other office, with the other office as the destination. Then if anyone at either office dials a number covered by that rule, the call goes to the other office, and the CME there will try to match the exact destination phone. It's pretty simple so long as the number ranges are different and not all mixed up between the two offices.

Roger Kallberg · ‎03-08-2020

For the routers to connect with each other you’d need to setup dial peers that points to the other. On these dial peers you setup destination patterns for the other office numbers. I would recommend use of SIP on the dial peers.

If you give a bit of more details on your directory numbers we would be able to give you a more specific answer.

Chris Campbell · ‎03-09-2020

Thank you!

It's a really simple setup -- right now there's a PBX in the main office with four incoming POTS lines and the branch office has one incoming POTS line.

I'm going to get a used IP phone to learn with... ... Any recommendations? And then do I have to buy a separate license for the phone to use with the CME licensed router or is that already included with the router or phone?

TONY SMITH · ‎03-10-2020

CME licensing is a bit of a bag of worms as it depends on the router platform, so (I think) different for a 29xx compared to an ISR4xxx. What models are your routers? 7821 would be a good phone if you can pick out up. Make sure it has the "Enterprise" firmware, not third party call control. Although they can be reflashed if necessary.

Chris Campbell · ‎03-10-2020

I'm going to be learning on a 29xx series.

TONY SMITH · ‎03-11-2020

Cisco 29xx needs the UC licence, part "L-SL-29-UC-K9=" in case you don't already have it. This licence is enforced, but I expect it can be enabled for an evaluation period if that helps. As far as I can determine the CME feature is a right to use licences, not enforced but needs to be enabled in the configuration.

"show license" shows what's currently installed/available, for example the UC licence shows as ..

Index 3 Feature: uck9
        Period left: Life time
        License Type: Permanent
        License State: Active, In Use
        License Count: Non-Counted
        License Priority: Medium