Queue PRI channel reservation

Asterisk Asterisk General
#1

Hi all,

I ran into a situation a week ago where our PBX reached its concurrent call limit (115). All attempted incoming calls during peak performance rang busy to the calling user. We currently have 5 PRIs through AT&T that are shared between 4 different calling queues, with one queue in particular having nearly 80%-90% of the call volume. All calls are inbound. Here is the bottom of my zapata.conf:
signalling => pri_cpe
switchtype=national
context=incoming
group=1
channel => 1-23
channel => 25-47
channel => 49-71
channel => 73-95
channel => 97-119

Ok, so is there a way to reserve channels, say maybe 2 or 3, for the lighter volume queues in the case that the high volume queue peaks like it did last week? I am aware of grouping in the zapata.conf file, but our PRIs are Long Distance PRIs, and thus do not have DID numbers…only toll-free numbers. Hence, I don’t think it’s possible to predict what channel a particular toll-free number is going to ring through, unless it goes by circuit IDs (which I think it does), but we still have a similar issue. Anyway, I’m looking for some way to segment a few channels to lighter queues for peak hours. Thanks.

#2

having experienced this, i always put a maxlen=XX parameter into each queue config which makes additional calls into that queue fail over and allows me to reserve a couple of outbound lines for emergencies [like the CEO wants to call his wife :smiley: ]

#3

So if I set a maxlen=XX parameter for the high volume queue, what happens to calls that exceed that parameter?

#4

presumably you have some sort of failover setting for calls that queue [i.e same processing as for say, a timeout]