Restricting the number of outgoing calls per provider

[ehmiller]

I'm surprised I couldn't find anything on this. I have Asterisk setup, I have a SPA-3000, and I have a Broadvoice connection as well. In my dialing plan, for a 7 digit number, it first picks the Broadvoice, then it picks the PSTN, then returns congestion. The problem is this:

If I dial out on one extension and then simultaneously dial out on another, it sends both outgoing calls through the Broadvoice connection. :!:

I know that's not going to score me any points with Broadvoice, and while it may be a gray area, if a third call were to be made it definitely would be against the TOS and would get me charged and/or booted. Is there any way to tell Asterisk how many calls to allow through a certain provider? I assume there's no way to allow it to make a second call only for three-way purposes, but then again Broadvioce probably can't tell if 2 outgoing calls are separate or three-way when coming from Asterisk anyway. I just want to know how to configure * so as know to get myself into trouble with my provider. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[mberlant]

There are two parameters designed that do just what you want, but are now defunct. It used to be that you could put "incominglimit=3" and/or "outgoinglimit=2" into sip.conf in your definition of your BroadVoice connection. These two parameters have been disabled, and my guess is it is because they were unreliable in keeping track of how many channels were active at any given time.

There are other commands that can be used as a workaround, namely SetGroup, CheckGroup, GetGroupCount and GetGroupMatchCount, but you will expend a lot of programming energy accomplish the simple function of outgoinglimit=2.