Pexip's "Bring your own carrier" — using your VTC system to dial out to PSTN

Pexip's "Bring your own carrier" (BYOC) lets you use your Pexip-registered video endpoints to dial out to PSTN destinations such as landline phones, mobile phones and audio bridges. So you no longer need a separate telephone in your conference room.

You choose which telephony carrier you want to use, and when you place a call, Pexip delivers the call to your chosen carrier who then handles the call the rest of the way.

BYOC currently supports calling from video endpoints registered to the Pexip Service only (it does not currently support calling from Trusted devices or the Pexip apps.)

This guide outlines how BYOC works and what’s involved in getting it up and running.

For help choosing how many phone numbers to buy, see Choosing phone numbers to use with Pexip's BYOC.

Here's an outline of how BYOC works

  1. The user places a call from their Pexip-registered video endpoint using a prefix that tells the Pexip Service which telephony carrier and which number/caller-id (the number being used to dial out) to use for the call.*
  2. The call is routed to the closest Pexip Point of Presence (PoP).
  3. Pexip routes the call to the carrier.
  4. The carrier may request authentication details, in which case Pexip provides a SIP username and password.* Although this step is optional, it is highly recommended for security purposes.
  5. The carrier accepts the call, and then delivers it to the destination PSTN number.

* Part of the configuration required on the Pexip Service.

Setting up BYOC

BYOC is flexible and gives you control over which carrier to use and the call plans you want to have. Below is an outline of the things you need to do to set up BYOC for your organization. Please contact your partner for more information and help.

  • First, decide which calls you want to make and choose which telephony carrier you want to deliver the calls. Pexip currently supports Twilio, Unifon (Norway only) and Voxbone but other carriers can be onboarded and tested on a case-by-case basis. You can have more than one carrier too.
  • You manage the commercial relationship with the carrier directly so you can agree with the carrier on the call plan, routing options, and toll charges for the call segment handled by the carrier.
  • If you want to use a session border controller (SBC), some configurations of Oracle's Enterprise Session Border Controller (E-SBC) have been tested with BYOC. Other SBCs may also be suitable but would need to be configured and tested.
  • You obtain a BYOC license from your partner which enables the feature for all your video endpoints. The cost is based on the number of video endpoints you have registered to the Pexip Service, unless you have the Connect Standard bundle in which case there is no additional cost for BYOC.
  • Get implementation details from the carrier to provide to your partner so that configuration can be completed on the Pexip Service.

    • Carrier’s SIP address. We strongly recommend using TLS (port 5061).
    • SIP authentication details (username and password). SIP authentication is strongly recommended but not mandatory.
    • Caller ID(s). The Caller ID will be shown as the calling number on the recipient’s phone. This will be the same for all video endpoints using the same rule to dial out.
  • Decide how many rules to have and what prefixes to use. Rules and prefixes are part of the configuration on the Pexip Service. Rules have two main purposes:

    • Enabling Pexip to route the call to the correct carrier with the correct caller id.
    • Allowing you to specify the prefix value that your end users enter when placing a call.

    This allows you to have a different rule for each country you want to dial, and set the prefix so that the dial string looks the same as what you’d enter into a landline phone keypad. For example, a rule for dialing an international call to the UK could have a prefix set to +44. All your end users would enter at the video endpoint then is +44 followed by the national subscriber phone number.

    If you have Microsoft Teams CVI, Teams Room, or Google Meet interoperability, and endpoints that register to the same domain as used for Teams / Google Meet, then you cannot use a digit as a dial prefix (note that directly registered endpoints can use just the numerical conference ID for this type of call). It must be the non-digit + character (otherwise it will lead to a dial plan clash and calls will fail). Note that if you have Cisco endpoints you can use a macro to transform what your users dial to include a prefix that matches what is configured on the Pexip Service.

For more information about prefixes, see Defining prefixes to use with Pexip's BYOC.

Dialing into a Pexip-registered video endpoint from PSTN

Depending on the carrier’s capabilities, it may also be possible to map incoming calls to specific video endpoints. For this, one dial-in number is required per video endpoint.

Next steps

Your partner can guide you further so please get in touch with them for assistance.

To find out more about setting up outbound configurations (from the Pexip Service to PSTN) with Twilio, see Configuring a Twilio SIP trunk for use with Pexip's "Bring your own carrier".

See also Using your VTC system to dial out to PSTN where we have provided help for your end users on how to make a call using BYOC.