Allworx Technical Support Forum

Hi
I am new to Allworx so please excuse me if I am not using the right terms. I'm a newbie
I have 3 paging zones setup.
460 pages all phones and PA horn
461 is phones only
469 is Pa horn only
The problem I am having is that the remote phones are not being paged. These are at my second location via the internet.
When some dials 460 to page I have it set up so that the page goes over the PA horn and all phones. (remote phone are checked). I can page from a remote phone to the office and it works but not from the office to my remote phones.
Can any one point me in the right direction on where to look to fix this?
Many thanks
Mike

Hi Mike -
Getting remote paging to work has been a struggle for me for years as well. It hasn't been a "must have" feature for us thank goodness, but it's now starting to get to that point. One workaround solution would be to run the phones over a VPN tunnel so they'd behave like local phones, but that just adds an additional level of complexity for the user and additional scope of support for me, so I'd prefer to avoid it. Did you ever figure out a solution for this?

This cannot be done with remote phones, because of the way multicast traffic works. Paging from those phones work because that is unicast from the phone to the PBX but from the PBX is sends the traffic out as a broadcast, which broadcast traffic does not work over the public internet. Even if they were at a MPLS site, it can be done but typically with great difficulty and the ISP has to support it. It would be costly, but the only way to do this would be to have some device on the local network look for the broadcast traffic and then to send it via unicast to a receiver at the remote phone site, and then that end re-broadcast it out to the phone.

If the second site is done via a VPN then you may be able to setup multi-cast routing on your firewall to send it over the VPN to the remote phone site and to rebroadcast that out. So this again would require a VPN but also hardware that would still allow that traffic to pass. VPN is the preferred method for remote phones as well as NAT'ting does not play nice with SIP so when we run into customers who have issues with remote phones like intermittent no audio, OWA, registration issues, etc. we almost always recommend them to go through a VPN tunnel at that point.