sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Avaya - Lucent Telephones & Systems Centrex PRI with IP Office

Will the Avaya IPO support centrex services and dialing over a PRI? Curious if any of you all have used this & your experiences. Thanks,

Maybe someone else will chime in, but i have never heard of a centrex PRI. If it truly is a PRI, then there should be no problems. Just find out how it is provisioned first.....

Nor have I. I sure have wished for them in prior instances.

Centrex is just a set of CO provided features like call transfer to another outside number, etc. How the provider delivers the service (POTS or PRI) is irrelevant. If the IPO can provide a flash button there should be no problem.

And I have never heard of Centrex over PRI either. Not that it can't be done, it's just that the service providers don't want to. Traditionally Centrex is a POTS service because it was originally designed for a building full of single line phones and separate DNs for each, all on the same Centrex plan. Picking up a phone and dialing the last three or four digits of another phone's DN will "intercom" that phone. Dial "9" and you get an outside line. Think hospital.

-Hal

I work for a Telco and have deployed several Centrex PRIs. In the past I have found that some telephone systems do not support Centrex services over the PRI. One manufacturer told us it was "not in their software stack" to support Centrex PRI (whatever that means). I just wanted to make sure the IPO had no issue before I designed the calling plan and voice network around it. Thanks,

Ok. I think you need to be a lot more specific here as to what you consider Centrex to be and how those systems didn't support it. What exactly were the problems?

As to the IPO, I really can't give you any kind of an answer until we see what you are talking about.

-Hal

The system/manufacturer that did not support Centrex PRI supported nothing. Not even dial 9. Could not establish an outgoing call. Dial 9 to access the PRI then 9 to dial out and nothing would happen.

It would be nice to be able to simply 4 digit dial out of the IPO to others within the Centrex group and we like to use a Centrex paging access code for overhead paging on-site and to remote locations. I am not really hung up on trying to establish TBCT with the IPO.

Wow, this has me a bit stumped. While it it true that Centrex lines are really just POTS lines with more features, I've always wondered why this same feature set can't be delivered via a PRI. I don't really see how this would be an issue as long as the PRI is configured with said features.

Most systems that I know of treat the "B" channels on a PRI as both-way trunks, just as if they were typical copper ones. The difference being that these trunks are essentially virtual.

With that said (keep in mind that I'm not familiar with the IPO), I agree that there should be a way to do this. I'm thinking that you'd need to teach the IPO to handle the four-digit routing of calls through digit modification (ARS/LCR) on a good day or through more advanced manipulation using system networking so that a uniform four-digit dialing plan can be maintained. The IPO is mighty flexible, but again, I've never seen Centrex features offered on a PRI by ANY service provider.

I'm hoping that further input might expose all of us to something new.