The term Location in Webex Calling

[mdrangell22]

I'm a CUCM on-premise worker and I'm starting reading about Webex Calling and I don't understand very well the term location.

This is a Cisco Definition: "Locations help you arrange your organization’s workforce into logical groupings. For example, a multinational enterprise may have multiple offices around the world, each with markedly different Webex collaboration requirements"

But what about an organization with multiples branches in the same country? Example If I have a customer in Colombia where the main office is in Bogoto and also the customer has a brach in Cali and another branch in Bucaramanga so should I create 3 location? or just 1 location is needed??

In case I should create 3 locations which codec should I use beetwen them? I have read that internal calls use codec g.722 and that is not need to configure g.729 between branches is that correct? In CUCM the codec prefereces between branches is g.729

[kctrey]

All Users/Workspaces at a Location share some common things: PSTN connection, DID pool, Call Park Extensions/Groups, etc..

In general, we recommend a unique Location per physical building, but a group of buildings in close proximity, like you would find in a campus environment, might be able to share the same Location. One of the other key things that is assigned at the Location is the Time Zone, so it is advisable to at least not have physical buildings in different time zones in the same Location. You can override at the user level, but that gets more complex.

Location is also the key grouping for Regional Media. In the United States, for example, a Location in California will have a primary association with the west coast data center and a Location in New York will be associated with the East Coast (New York) data center.

The limitation of Locations is that, since a User or Workspace is assigned to a Location when it is created, there is no method (yet) to move a User/Workspace between Locations without recreating them, and optionally moving their existing DID from Location to Location.

Without knowing what each branch in Columbia is used for, it might be possible to keep all of them in a single Location, assuming they all use the same PSTN connectivity. Columbia only has a single time zone, so the time zone is not a concern there. Your account team can advise you on the best approach for your specific situation, but, as I stated, we recommend a unique Location per building unless you have a specific reason not to.

As for the codec and call routing, an inter-Location call is no different than an intra-Location call. They serve as a logical grouping but are all part of the same Organization so all calls will route on-net (unless the Location is in India or China, in which case, it's more complicated), and they will use the same ordered codec list, with Opus as the primary codec, falling back to G711 and G729.