[asterisk-users] Re: is dundi worth pursuing in this situation?

[JR Richardson]

> At work, I have 4 branch offices at which I've deployed asterisk.
> Call termination/origination at each branch office is handled either
> through a frac PRI or 3rd party SIP provider.  Soon, I'll be replacing
> the legacy PBX at our HQ with asterisk.
>
> Each branch office has between 3 and 20 employees, each with their own
> extension and DID, and at headquarters, we have about 70 people, again
> each with their own extensions and DID.
>
> Handling local and LD calls from all the offices isn't a big deal -
> just normal call routing for that.  My main question is what to do
> with calls between the offices.  Each branch is connected back to HQ
> with a persistant VPN tunnel - I've tested IAX2 traffic over these
> tunnels before, and things work great.  Since this works fairly well,
> I envision using IAX trunks for all intra-office calls.  So - in this
> situation, would it be easier to just manage the office dialplan(s)
> and call routing manually, or would it be worth it to set up dundi for
> extension discovery?

Erik,

What you have to ask yourself; is this environment dynamic, frequent
changes, adding, deleting DID, extensions, then DUNDi will do better
than static dialplans.  If the setup will be pretty much the same
day-in and day-out, not much change or activity, then static dialplans
may be better.  I like to think of what would be easiest to
troubleshoot and repair when a problem occurs.  Static would also be
pretty easy if you can route summarize, i.e. office 1 had all 3XXX
office 2 has all 4XXX, office 3 has all 5XXX, and DID are prefixed
with different NPA/NXX.

DUNDi adds a layer of complexity but can give you great flexibility
for growth and scalability, once it's up and running it just works.  I
would not use it because it's the techie thing to do, I would use it
because I have an ever changing environment and truly need dynamic
extension & DID routing between remote locations/servers.

Hope this helps.  Sorry if it's clear as mud.

Good Luck

JR

-- 
JR Richardson
Engineering for the Masses