Surface Hub PSTN calling options?

Bronze Contributor

This is probably as much an Office 365 question as a surface hub question, but I'll start here: 

 

We have surface hubs set up using room accounts in Office 365, and they currently have an E1 license assigned.  If I want to enable people to dial in to conferences using the surface hub, do I just need to add the pstn conferencing option to the surface hub account?

 

What if I wanted to make outbound calls from the hub?  Can I do that by just upgrading it to an E5 license and adding the PSTN connectivity option?  If so, does adding E5+PSTN to just one (or a few) accounts affect the rest of our accounts/O365 tenant or have any other consequences that may not be obvious?

6 Replies
The challenge with the Surface Hub is that it does not actually create it's own meetings. You need to invite its account to the meeting.
However if the Skype for Business account that the Hub uses has access to PSTN calling then it can dial out to other people and bring them in to the meeting.
Adding just PSTN conferencing, or E5+PSTN to a single user account doesn't affect the rest of the accounts as while the service functionality is lit up - it's only usable by the account that is licensed for them.

Ahh yes, that makes sense.  The meeting organizer has to have the PSTN conferencing option enabled, and the hub can't organize meetings.  Hmm... that does change things a bit.  

 

So, as far as licensing for the hub goes, the only option to join attendees via PSTN is to add an E5+PSTN package, and then dial out to attendees from the hub when ready to start the meeting.  Do I have that right?

 

Would that allow dialing out to multiple attendees to join a single meeting?

 

I wish MS would offer free trial licensing on an existing tenant, rather than having to spin up a whole new tenant.  I'd really like to be able to add a handful of 30 day evaluation licenses for a service from time to time.  In many cases, it makes it very hard to effectively evaluate a new feature when it requires an entirely seperate tenant.  It's not like I've got spare surface hubs lying around to set up with demo accounts in a different tenant, and doing a reset on our hub to set it up for a test account would make for a lot of downtime.   

Yeah, if the Hub is licensed for it then you can dial people in to the Skype Meeting from the device itself.
With regards to E5 - you should be able to get a trial of that in your existing tenant?

I assigned the surface hub account an E5 + PSTN conf. and am not able to dial out.. when I use my desktop client it works by dialing the number using 001 xxx .... but when I type it on the surface its not giving me any option to dial the number. Were you successful?

Ours can, but that being said we're using on-prem for the Hub itself.

Hello,

 

PSTN Conferencing is a meeting Creator feature. The Hub does not beneficiate from such licence has it will not organize meetings unless you localy invite more that 1 user.

If you want to use the PSTN capabilities of the HUB you need Cloud PBX and PSTN calling Feature.

It is available as an add on for E1 E3 and E5.

My recommendation for the Hub is E1 and Cloud PBX and PSTN calling.

More detail available here : https://products.office.com/en-us/skype-for-business/pstn-calling-plans

 

If you want to have the dialout feature it requires the Meeting organisator be be E5 or have the PSTN Conferencing addon.

 

Hope it is clearer.