In the old good days, when the PSTN was rocking, people only had one phone line (or two if they could afford it). This means that there could only be one call regardless of who called who or how many phone extensions your home had. Some VoIP Service owners find that translating the same behaviour to customers who come from PSTN may be the best approach, after all, they are not used to all the goodies VoIP offers. I find that the right approach. You skip all the drama trying to explain the different call flows to someone. Keep it simple.
I will explain here how to accomplish that.
Fixing the Number of Simultaneous Calls per Extension
This is the easiest use case FusionPBX has it out of the box. All you need to do is edit an extension, look for the limit max and limit destination fields and customize them.
Usually, the default values are okay you shouldn't change them.
Fixing the Number of Simultaneous Calls per Domain
The first approach will be to fix the number of simultaneous calls globally, this means if you have only allowed one call, then the second call will be rejected regardless if it is an incoming or outgoing call. The FusionPBX has by default a call-limit dialplan (disabled) but it doesn't work out of the box, so we need to fix it. Follow these steps:
- Edit the caller-details dialplan, you will find it in the inbound routes and add a set line call_direction=inbound. If you are updating from an earlier FusionPBX release (earlier than 4.4), likely, you won't have this dialplan. Here is a screenshot. Just create it if you don't have it.
- Go to the Dialplan Manager and enable the call-limit dialplan. You may want to make it a global dialplan (aka shared dial plans) if you want to make this a global thing in your PBX.
- Go to the Outbound Routes and for each outbound route you have, insert a line like this before the first bridge statement:
hash inbound ${domain_uuid} ${max_calls}!USER_BUSYand again, you may want to make your outbound routes global - Go to the Dialplan Manager, and edit the variables dialplan. Add the max_call variable like any other.
You are done, at this point, the number of simultaneous calls, regardless of whether they are incoming or outgoing, is given by the max_call variable.
Fixing the Number of Simultaneous Incoming and Outgoing Calls per Domain Independently
Some odd scenarios may need a different number of incoming or outgoing calls. For example, you may give your customer six simultaneous incoming calls, and only two simultaneous outgoing calls. This is kind of more advanced stuff, if you need this, don't hesitate to contact me for support.
Good luck!
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