Limit calls to an MGCP gateway

[sirroutesalot]

I have a situation in which my PRI trunking is suffient for normal day to day operations, but quarterly my company has a conference call with 1000 participants (about 400 of which are in my corporate office) and I only have 161 PRI channels to support outbound calling. I have many other PRI's at other sites that I can send calls to using VOIP, but I don't want to fill up these remote location PRI's or they would be unable to use thier PRI for day to day business during this call.

Is there a way I can put a PRI gateway into the route group I use for the big conference call and then only allow calls through that route group to take up a portion of the gateway capacity, so that I have some left for normal business calling?

Ideally I'd like it to work like this:

Calls to go...

PRI-Gateway-1 --> when 18 channels become full, roll to:
PRI-Gateway-2 --> when 18 channels become full, roll to:
PRI-Gateway-3 --> when 18 channels become full, roll to:
PRI-Gateway-4.... and so on.

so that each PRI always has some capacity left.

I've thought of putting the gateway in a "location" and limiting the BW, but that would affect my day to day business as well.

I suppose if I made enough gateways available in the route-list/route-groups for this call, and set the Distribution Algorithm to "circular" so that it spreads out the load, that would work.

Anyway, I'm fishing for feedback from someone who might have worked through this before. Our next big call is on May 3rd.

Thanks in advance all

 

[pndscm]

I'd remove one of the PRI's from the Route List that carries the Conference Call traffic and make it available for regular outgoing traffic. Put in a Route Pattern specific to the conference dial in number, point it to a Route List that has all but one PRI in it. For normal traffic, have a seperate RP that points to a Route List that has ALL the PRI's in it. Automatically, you have 1 PRI available for normal traffic.