6900 Handset Phone Page Zones

6900 series handsets have a built in paging facility that uses IP multicast to broadcast RTP from one handset to multiple handsets at the same time.

The 6900 Paging section provides an interface for creating one or more 'Page Zones' that can be used to page between groups of handsets.

Due to the nature of IP multicast, 6900 handset paging can only be used where the handset are on the same network and will receive the multicast packets.

6900 Handset Page Zones are separate to the page zones configured on the telephone system. 6900 handsets can access telephone system page zones to page MiNET and Digital handsets, but this cannot be done in reverse.

Page Zones

Each page zone created requires three properties:

A list of handsets that will listen to this address and port combination
An IP multicast address (calculated from the Base Paging Multicast address)
A port number (uses the Base Paging Port number)

In normal use the IP address and port are configured automatically by the system and will not need to be altered. If they do need to be altered they can be amended under the Advanced Options.

How the multicast address is calculated for each page zone

The 'Base Paging Multicast Address' is used to calculate the IP address for each page zone created. Every time a page zone is added, it is assigned a unique ID which start from 1 and are incremented for each new page zone. This ID is added to the base address to guarantee a unique address for each zone.

This means if you have 10 paging zones they will use (by default) IP addresses 224.0.0.151-224.0.0.160. If a page zone is deleted the IP address will not be re-used, if you delete and add a new one it will use 224.0.0.161.

The default base paging multicast address is configured to 224.0.0.150.

The base address may need to be changed if there is other equipment on site using multicast addresses in the range from the base address up to the number of paging zones you created. The valid range of IP multicast addresses is: 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255.

The default base paging port is 33100. This is used for all paging zones. The port number has a valid range of 1 to 65535.

Configuring Page Zones

To add a new page zone, press the 'Add' button. On the form that displays enter a unique description. (To override the automatically generated multicast address at this time, tick the Advanced Options and enter an IP multicast address E.g. 244.0.0.3).

Once a page zone has been created, the 'Apply' icon can be used to select the phones that will be configured to listen on this address/port combination.

Pages cannot be sent to hot desk phones, only fixed phones. Pages will still be sent to a base phone if a hot desk phone is logged in.

At this point, the page zone has been created and the phones have been configured to listen. A page button will need to be added to the keymap of any handset required to make pages. Please refer to the Keymap Profile section for more information.

Page Zones can not be sent to the handsets in real-time. Handsets will not start to receive pages until they are rebooted. If a Handset is removed from a page zone it will continue to receive pages on that zone until it is rebooted.

A Handset can be in a maximum of 5 Page Zones. If it is added to more than 5 Page Zones, additional zones will be ignored.