Force Internal Routing

[timul20]

Hi

I work for an organisation that operates from a number of different offices (over 100) and operates a mixed environment with some offices on legacy telephony systems and some on a clustered mitel 3300 environment running 9.0.3.15 and because of this users often don't know whether colleagues are "internal", or "external" and as a result often just dial out to the destination DDI.

With the Cisco IP systems there is a feature called Forced On-Net dialling. Does anyone know whether there is a simple way to do this with Mitel 3300s via ARS? Any suggestions gratefully received!

 

[nytalkin]

without clustering, ARS is the only option. you must first have a unified numbering plan. The routes for ARS have to be defined. This forum really isn't the appropriate place to design an ARS scheme as large as the one you describe. If you have access to MOL there is documentation decribing ARS designs.

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED!

 

[MitelInMyBlood]

With 100+ offices I can certainly understand the problem as well as the preference for these calls to use internal trunking.

Your Mitel system can certainly do this but as NYTalkin suggests, this is likely to take some extensive work in your ARS tables, especially if the number blocks overlap and/or are wildly fragmented. We at one time had more than 80 offices with tielines going everywhere and an ARS table that would choke a horse. Going to a uniform numbering plan across the enterprise is what we finally did. It's not as important today with toll costs down to under 5 cents a minute, but you're still unnecessarily depleting (or having to over-provision) your outside lines to accommodate the users placing DDI calls to internal numbers).

Once done then you must replicate this effort at your other sites (assuming as you say, a hodge-podge of phone systems).

Pay me now or pay me later. In the interim it might be worth the PR effort to educate employees on how to place internal calls and then periodically remind them.


Original MUG/NAMU Charter Member

 

[Supernova99]

The easiest way for such a large network that is not clustered is to provision a site code (prefix) for each site. Then apply theses codes to each system via ARS, that way if there any number clashes around the sites the prefix will make it unique. Lastly as has already been said is to educate users that they should be dialling the site code plus extn. Maybe having a 'corporate' online telephone directory with the dialling prefixes might help.



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[timul20]

Guys

Thanks very much for your replies. I'm not sure whether this makes any difference but not sure I made it clear before; our Mitel Controllers are all properly clustered and we do have a proper numbering scheme. Does this make a difference?

 

[dryaquaman]

I think what nytalkin, Mitelinmyblood and Supernova99 is trying to explain is that you will have to set up an ARS route specifically to intercept calls to each office.

For example: if the remote office number is 555-555-1234 you need an ars route to take 915555551234, strip off the 91555555 and then send 1234 to the route pointing to the correct office.

This can be a lot of programming depending on how you're clustered(star type or mesh type) and how many numbers you're dealing with. So how much labor it would take would be any body's guess at this point. It's doable though.

This will also be a pain to administer and troubleshoot. You'd have to weigh the cost difference between educating your users and having to pay for all the labor up front.

A variation of Supernova99's suggestion that I've used is to set up a "Customer net" with single unique access code. You'd tell the user that if they're dialing any other office you'd dial <unique code>+extension number.

Either way, it's a lot of programming.

DryAquaman

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