Emergency all-company alert paging - best practices

[jpercival]

Our IT department was just reminded by our building/safety manager that we need to verify that our all-company paging system is functional for tornadoes, active shooter drills, etc. This made me realize that there is nothing in place in our 3CX system.

I have set up a few very small (2-5 phone) paging groups, but nothing to this scale. I've read a few forum posts that kind of glance over this process so I have a very basic idea of what needs to be done. I do see that adding a large number of phones can cause massive delays and be problematic. We use a blend of newer Fanvil and Grandstream phones so multicast should be doable if needed.

Have have 4 different cities that each have their own local PBX. 3 of our 4 cities only have 20 or fewer phones so I'm not sure if multicast will be needed. Our main location has about 150 phones so that's the one I'm worried about.

What would the best practice be for alerting 150 phones all at once if needed? Is it simply setting up a paging group and adding every single extension to it? Each of our cities is its own group within 3CX but it doesn't look like predefined groups can be added to ring groups.

Any pointers? Thanks in advance, everyone!

Bare metal Windows Server 2019
Enterprise Annual 16.0.9

 

[VasilisV_3CX]

Hi @jpercival,

Since the paging group limit is 64, for 150 phones I'd suggest setting up a multicast paging group in this scenario. Note that multicast only works with locally provisioned deskphones.

More on Multicast here.

More on setting up paging groups here.

Also: https://www.3cx.com/blog/vlog/erl-elin-kari-e911-regulation/

 

[VoIPTools]

I have not tested this recently, but I have found adding more than about 15 phones to a paging group results in significant delays between when you place the call and when you can start speaking. Multi-cast is the way to go when needing to page to more than a few phones.

But you make another point. Do you really want to be standing at your phone waiting for all the calls to connect while there is an active shooter nearby? Wouldn't it be better if you had a BLF you could press that plays a pre-recorded message similar to "Tornado warning! Move to the nearest shelter immediately", and have it continuously play this message while you run for shelter? Then, once you are in a safe location, turn off the alarm simply by dialing the "tornado warning" extension a second time?

I can think of a lot of scenarios where this would be helpful -- fire alarms, tornado warnings, active shooters, a moose sighting (that's a real thing), a crazy person in the lobby, etc.

If this sound like something you can use, you may want to take a look at our 3CX Emergency Notifier tool. In addition to handling alarms, we also monitor for emergency numbers being dialed so you can notify your internal emergency responders by phone, email, SMS and desktop popup. We can tell you precisely where the person is that dialed the emergency number (address, floor, pillar, cubicle) and automatically update extension location based on IP address. so your caller ID is correct.