Providers

A provider is an account at a VoIP provider or a SIP trunk, or another PBX reached over SIP or IAX. It carries the calls between the PBX and the outside world. Providers are managed under Accounts → Providers.

Outgoing calls are routed by the provider’s dial patterns, incoming calls by its incoming routes. Changes take effect after you apply them, see Applying changes.

Provider list

Click SIP provider or IAX provider above the list to add a provider. The list shows:

The search field above the list finds providers by name, host or user name; how searching and paging work is described in Lists.

The buttons at the end of each row edit, disable/enable and delete the provider. A disabled provider does not register and is not used for calls. Deleting a provider also disables the external phones that dialled through it.

The same states, together with the phones and the active calls, are shown under Status → Calls & Registrations.

Add or edit a provider

Your provider’s documentation or customer portal lists the values you need: the server (host), your user name and password, and sometimes a separate authentication user or a required From domain. The form has four tabs.

Account

Outgoing calls

A phone can override the caller ID per provider and can be blocked from using a provider, see Outgoing calls in the phone settings. Many providers only accept or show caller IDs that belong to your account.

Incoming calls

Codecs & advanced

Dial patterns

A dial pattern decides which numbers dialled on a phone leave the PBX through this provider, and how the number is changed before it is sent. The syntax is:

[prefix to add+][prefix to strip|]pattern

The pattern itself uses the Asterisk pattern characters:

The digits before | belong to the pattern but are removed before dialling. The digits before + are put in front of the number. Each of | and + may appear only once.

Tips:

• A typical setup uses an outside line prefix: 0|X. on the main provider sends everything that starts with 0 there.
• When several patterns (of one or several providers) match a number, the most specific pattern wins, so 0|00X. for international calls beats 0|X..
• The same pattern cannot be used by two providers; the form reports which provider already has it. Use the failover provider for a backup route instead.
• Always add the emergency numbers (for example 112, 110, 911) if phones dial them without a prefix.
• Patterns must not overlap with internal numbers that should stay internal. Internal numbers are checked first when a phone dials.
• Numbers dialled with a leading + are matched after the + has been replaced, see Dialplan → Transfers & Parking.

Incoming routes

Incoming routes decide where a call from this provider goes, based on the number that was called (the DID). Click Add route to add a row with a pattern and a destination:

The destination can be a phone, a call group, a conference room, an application, an IVR menu or business hours, see Destinations.

• Several routes with the same pattern and phones as destinations ring those phones at the same time.
• If no route matches, the called number is looked up among the objects that are reachable from outside (public direct dial): if it equals the number or public name of such a phone, call group, application, conference room or IVR menu, the call goes there.
• Some providers always send your account user name instead of the dialled number. A route with an empty pattern catches these calls too.

Route an incoming number to an IVR menu

1. Create the menu under Dialplan → IVR Menus.
2. Open the provider, tab Incoming calls, click Add route.
3. Enter the number (or leave the pattern empty for all numbers) and choose the menu as destination.
4. Save and apply the changes.

To answer with a different menu outside office hours, route the number to business hours instead, with one menu as When open and another as When closed.

Failover

If a call through this provider fails because the provider is unavailable or congested, the PBX tries the Failover provider. The failover provider must be enabled and have a dial pattern that matches the dialled number; its own pattern rules (strip and add prefixes) are applied. A busy line or a call that is not answered is not retried.

Several accounts at one provider

You can add several SIP accounts with the same host, for example one per number. The PBX tells incoming calls apart by the account user name, so each account’s incoming routes apply to its own calls.