Paging Advice

[tomnorton]

Hi

Looking for some advice on people who have using paging for announcements within places like schools.

We are currently looking to install SIP Paging speakers across the whole school site. We have just ordered a Grandstream GSC3505 and a Fanvil PA2 unit to test the capabilities. We may have scenarios where we need to broadcast messages across the whole school, and other times maybe just to one zone.

I see other people have said that once you have 10-15 or more SIP speakers they recommend using Multicast. Looking into this it looks like you can only have one Multcast group per speaker. Would that be correct? I was originally thinking a site wide paging group and then smaller zone ones.

Any advice or recommendations greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Tom

 

[JohnS_3CX]

Hi Tom,

"Paging" alert has a limit of 64 devices maximum, so this is more ideal for having multiple small zones.

"Paging Multicast" has no such limit, but each device can only be part of a single multicast group, so you might want to use this option for a site-wide zone. Note that this only works on local installations where the PBX and devices sit on the same LAN. It will not work with STUN/SBC or segmented networks where the PBX traffic does not reach the speakers so keep that in mind.





Note: the Fanvil PA2 and iW30 in our template does not currently have multicast support in 3CX, but we have contacted the manufacturer to look into the possibility of adding it in a future update.

 

[tomnorton]

Hi John

Thanks for the information.

Is there a way to restrict who can call a page group? I just created a test one and it appears in the directory, which I don't really want. Ideally we want to restrict who can page site wide to a couple of extensions.

Thanks

 

[JohnS_3CX]

Hi Tom,

None that I'm aware of. Any extension will be able to call.

 

[Evolute IT]

Hi John

Thanks for the information.

Is there a way to restrict who can call a page group? I just created a test one and it appears in the directory, which I don't really want. Ideally we want to restrict who can page site wide to a couple of extensions.

Thanks

You cannot prevent them from calling but you can disable them from showing up in Settings > Options (under Phones/Apps section.)