Broadcast Audio from non-Cisco IP Phone to Cisco IP Phones

ShutEyeThinkin · ‎11-11-2008

My company has its own in-house-designed proprietary IP Phone. One issue I'm working on is to find the simplest and best way to have one of our IP Phones Broadcast audio to the speaker on all Cisco IP Phones in the network.

I assume that:

(1) a CiscoIPPhoneExecute must be sent to each and every Cisco phone to set it to receive Multicast, effectively doing a Broadcast.

(2) I must know the IP address of every Cisco Phone on the Network.

My questions are:

1. Is there any other way to Broadcast audio to the speaker on Cisco IP Phones?

2. If I must know the IP address of every Cisco IP Phone, in order to send a CiscoIPPhoneExecute message to each, what is the best way to obtain these IP addresses?

3. Is there any way to obtain these Cisco IP addresses other than from CallManager?

Thanks all.

ShutEyeThinkin

msabir · ‎11-11-2008

1. Multicast the audio to an IP multicast address.

2. Send RTPRx command (via CiscoIPPhoneExecute or JTAPI) to get the phones recieve the audio via speaker (or handset if user has already picked it up).

3. If you are using Execute command, you need IP of each phone. You can get the IP along with the phone list via AXL/SOAP (4.x through 6.x) or DeviceListx.asp (if you are using CCM 4.x)

4. If can also push RTPRx via JTAPI and you do not need IP address for every phone for that. However, with this approach, you are going to be more dependent on CCM version.

In award-winning PhoneTop Messenger product, we use AXL/SOAP approach to get the phone list and then use CiscoIPPhoneExecute. This way, our product doesn't break with CCM upgrades.

ShutEyeThinkin · ‎11-12-2008

Very good info.

Also,

When the IP Phone is set to receive multicast pkts, does it automatically issue a "Join Multicast Group" message so the Multicast Router will let multicast pkts thru to it?

msabir · ‎11-12-2008

All you have to do is to send RTPRx command, it takes care of everything else.