Basically I want a broadcast hunt group on an E1.

If I configure a sinlge ephone-dn dual-line I presume I can only have a max of two calls so on a full 30 channel E1 I need to have 15 ephone-dns dual-line on a overlay key to give me 30 concurrent calls to the hunt group?

I know this works fine, just not sure if anyone knows a better way of doing this?

Hi Lee,

The thing that ephones and hunt groups are significantly different things than POTS / PRI lines. Also I would need to understand what do you mean by broadcast hunt groups, do you mean perhaps paging in which a set of ephones automatically answers call and set the speaker on?

You say that you know that it works fine, still it is not clear to me what this application does. Who is calling who ? Are calls with to PRI inbound or outbound ? Are calls made to different numbers or all call are made to the same number ?

Sorry, I still can't figure out what is that you really want to do.

I want a group of phones to ring simultaneously on an inbound call from an E1.

I could have thirty calls on all the channels to the same number so I have assigned 15 dual-line ephone-dn's to an overlay button to achive this.

Basically I want to know if there is a simpler or recommended way of doing this rather than have all those ephone-dn's as if so I would prefer to do it correctly.

I understand now, thanks for explaining.

The matter is not so simple, and at the end, I would suggest you configure an hunt-group with login/logout functionality, OR explore the parallel-hunt features of SIP phones (read at the end).

Why is that, let's analyze by prefacing the goal that you have, a set of phones (30 or more) answering incoming calls to the same number on a full E! PRI. In other words, a small call center. For some reason, you like all the phones ringing at once and the operators "race" to answer them.

First of all, the only mechanism of in CCME to ring more than a phone at the same time, is using shared "ephone-dn" on buttons - there is no alternative ASAIK.

But with shared/overlay buttons, when an ephone takes a call for a given ephone-dn, it actually "becomes" that ephone-dn, and takes up one line of the maximum two that are available. Further calls to the same number will NOT ring other phones.

Consequently, you have to build a chain of "call-forward busy" from an ephone-dn to another, repeated for as many lines you are be handling. Kind of ugly, but it works.

Using dual-line ephone-dn does not help for the reason given above, if the ephone-dn is dual-line, further incoming calls will ring only the phone that has taken the first call, and if you configure "hutstop channel" you will defeat the purpose dual-line anyway.

I do not see alternative to this configuration using SCCP phones except an hunt-group. With the hunt-group, you have the choice of choosing which phones will ring first (eg the one that has been idle longer), and the set of ringing phones is dynamically updated accordingly to the presence of operators themselves with the button "Hlog". Also available is auto-logout, so if an operator forgets to logout before going home, the system will do that automatically.

The system will warn you when there are no more operators, provide call coverage reports, etc, all thing that I think a small call center would like to have.

Now, if you don't like anything of the above, what you can try for SIP phones only, there is a feature called parallel hunt groups, that you can read at:

http://cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps4625/products_configuration_guide_chapter09186a00806ba59c.html#wp1211316

I haven't tried that myself, and cannot give any practical advice about it.

Hope this helps, if do please rate post!

Thanks, I kind of guessed that would be the outcome.

Lee