Paging Groups

Paging Groups

A paging group broadcasts live audio to multiple phones at once, like a PA system: dial *80 + the group’s extension, speak after the beep, and every member phone auto-answers on speakerphone and plays your voice. Hang up and all speakers disconnect.

Nova PBX → Collaboration → Paging Groups lists every group with its extension, member count, priority, multicast channel, and status.

Related pages: Feature Codes · Extensions · Parking Lots

Paging vs Intercom vs Ring Group

Feature	Dial	Behavior
Paging group	*80 + group ext (e.g. *80720), or the phone’s paging key	All member phones play your voice on speaker; one-way
Single-phone intercom	*81 + extension (e.g. *811001)	One target phone auto-answers; private two-way conversation
Ring group	the group’s number	Phones ring normally; one person answers

Use paging when the audience shouldn’t have to pick up; use a ring group when exactly one person should take the call.

Creating a Paging Group

1. Click Add group (top-right).
2. Name the group (e.g. “Warehouse”) and pick its Extension — 3 digits recommended (e.g. 720); it cannot be changed after creation.
3. Choose the group’s Priority — Normal, Priority or Emergency (below). Priority is fixed once the group is created.
4. Turn on Members can page if member phones should get a paging key to broadcast to the group themselves.
5. Add the member extensions in the Members panel. The Who will hear this page list underneath shows, per member, which desk phones can receive pages and why any cannot.
6. Click Create group, then push live with Apply Changes.

To page it: pick up any phone and dial *80 + the extension (e.g. *80720). There is no ring phase — members’ phones answer immediately after the confirmation beep.

Zones: one group per area

Create a group per physical zone and one umbrella group for everything:

Group	Ext	Members
Warehouse	720	Dock + packing-station phones
Office All-Page	721	Every desk phone
Front Desk	722	Reception only

Front desk pages the warehouse with *80720 without disturbing the office; emergencies go out on *80721.

Priority

Priority	Behavior on the phone
Normal	Plays on idle phones; a phone on a call is not interrupted. The day-to-day setting.
Priority	Barges in over an active call on phones that support it.
Emergency	Highest priority — barges in. Reserve for evacuations and alarms.

Priority and Emergency each have a reserved channel, so an account that fills up with everyday groups can still create one of each.

Multicast channels

Each paging group gets its own multicast channel, assigned automatically when you save it — the edit page shows the channel number and address. Member desk phones are provisioned to listen on that channel. A page is a single audio stream that your office network delivers to every listening phone, so paging a large group puts no extra load on the phone system.

• Audio codec — every phone must decode the same codec, so the codec is one setting for all of your paging groups. G.711 µ-law works on every phone; G.722 gives HD audio when every phone in the office supports it.
• Channels per phone — a handset can only listen to so many channels: Grandstream 10, Polycom 25, Yealink 31. Past that, the lowest-priority channels are left off that phone (Emergency and Priority are kept first). The members list warns when your account has more channels than a member’s phone can hold.

Network requirements

Multicast pages stay on the local network. Check these before relying on paging:

• Same network only — phones must be on the same office network or voice VLAN as each other. Remote and work-from-home phones, softphones (Pulse, browser) and DECT handsets cannot hear multicast pages; the members list marks them so they aren’t silently missed.
• IGMP snooping — turn it on for the voice VLAN on your switches. Without it, every page floods to every port on the VLAN.
• Mixed brands — paging is guaranteed between phones of the same brand. Polycom shares one address for every group and tells groups apart by channel number, while Yealink, Grandstream and other brands use a separate address per group, so a group that mixes Polycom with Grandstream phones may not hear each other’s pages.

Managing Members

Members are managed on the group’s edit page — move extensions between Available extensions and Group members, Save changes, then Apply Changes. The header counts current selections, and Who will hear this page lists each member’s desk phones with a ready / limited / can’t-receive status.

Behavior Notes

• Phones answer via SIP auto-answer. Phones provisioned through SIPSTACK are configured for this; manually-configured phones may need their auto-answer/intercom setting enabled in the phone’s own UI.
• Pages are one-way. For a two-way conversation with one person, use single-phone intercom (*81 + extension).
• Pages are not recorded and never go to voicemail.
• The *80 code is internal-only. If you need an external caller to trigger a page, point an inbound route’s destination at the paging group — and treat that DID as carefully as a microphone to your whole floor.

Troubleshooting

• A phone didn’t play the page — check Who will hear this page on the group: the phone may be remote, a softphone or DECT handset, not provisioned, or over its channel limit. Otherwise it’s on a call with a Normal-priority page, or the change hasn’t been Applied yet.
• Pages reach phones in one office but not another — multicast doesn’t cross between sites or networks; give each site its own group.
• Page is silent on some phones — speakerphone volume on the member device.
• *80… plays “invalid” — wrong group extension, the group is Disabled, or staged changes were never applied.