Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Test mobility feature without PSTN

The core of the mobility feature is "Remote Destination". Per SRND http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/srnd/7x/mobilapp.html#wp1043943,

"Remote destinations must be Time Division Multiplex (TDM) devices or off-system IP phones on other clusters or systems. You cannot configure IP phones within the same Unified CM cluster as remote destinations. "
So if you'd like to test mobility feature without involving PSTN gateways, you may build another CUCM cluster (with VMWare, it should be just another VM). Then you may create ICT (Inter-Cluster Trunk) between two clusters. You may use the IP phones on another clusters as "Remote Destination". With this setup, you may test the following features:

1) Mobile Connect (SNR)
2) Enterprise Feature Access (EFA)

You won't be able to test the following feature:

MVA (Mobile Voice Access), because it requires IVR function of the voice gateway.

If you have a voice gateway but does not have T1/PRI, you may use CME to simulate PSTN phones.

2 comments:

  1. Cool trick Michael! You can even do a cheaper demo: create an ICT to yourself (destination of the ICT is the IP address of your CUCM itself). Just play with fake prefix and predot to match your internal num plan. Then you can use your internal IPPhone as remote destination or even a BRI line (for demo only of course).
    I still don't understand why Cisco only supports PRI and TDM destinations...

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  2. Hi Micheal,

    You could actually test MVA as long as you have a Router with the necessary Voice IOS. Even if you don't have Voice Interfaces.You just have to configure the GW as a IP2IP gateway. This basically means that it will also works fine with Dynamips.

    In fact, you could also get MVA to work with MGCP gateways by using VoIP Dial-peers.

    The main issue with MGCP has always been that the IP-IVR/VXML requires a dial-peer.

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