If you’re just starting out and anxious to get your shiny new pbx working, you will want to be up and live as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way. These initial ‘getting running’ problems can come from many different places depending on your setup, and they can often be some of the most frustrating.
Let’s say for example we have 2 PRI’s, and they can receive calls but can’t make them.
There are a couple of things you can try, firstly, on your trunk and outbound route, make sure you are properly passing the dialing string to the trunk. It’s likely that your provider has provided some assistance with the dialing string so I will save that for later.
A big thing that is often overlooked is the outbound caller id. In many cases this number must match one of the numbers assigned to the PRI that you are dialing out from, or else the carrier may reject it. Try using a DID that is known to work on that PRI and try again.
If your carrier didn’t give you much help setting up the dial string, then you can try this. Most likely your provider will want the numbers formatted like NXXNXXXXXX or +1NXXNXXXXXX, although some carriers may allow or require 1NXXNXXXXXX or allow short local calls like NXXNXXX.
In either case, make sure what you are sending matches what is required. The dialing string is broken into 4 parts: Prepend – Prefix – Match Pattern – Caller ID.
If your provider wants 9495552323 then you want to do:
Line1: Prepend: 949 Match: NXXXXXX
Line2: Prefix: 1 Match NXXNXXXXXX
If the want 19495552323:
Line1: Prepend: 949 Match NXXXXXX
Line2: Prepend: 1 Match: NXXNXXXXXX
Leave the other fields blank.
If you are unable to receive calls also, then you might want to look at your incoming routes. You need to match up with the DID, which is what’s sent by the provider. This can be the full number,9495552323, it can come with a 1 in front, like this: 19495552323 or it can be just the last 4 (or 6, or.. ?) digits of the phone number, so if the inbound number is 949-555-2323 the DID might be just 2323. You can look in the logs to see what is actually being used, vs what you think it should be.
If this still hasn’t worked, check into the log, and try to figure out what’s going on. You can use the forum on this site, try the ‘Upload Log’ feature to upload snippets of your logs, it works like a pastebin.
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