Questions on PSTN Calling - PSTN breakouts map

[SB V]

Hi Experts,

One of our customer has users in different sites (USA, UK, Ireland, Germany) and many users hosted on UK tenant who are frequently travels to USA.

In this case if they make any PSTN Calls to UK users from USA it gets routed based on the USA licenses that they've got assigned. Assumes that the calls hits UK datacenter first and then routed to USA  datacenter and reaches the destination which might case quality issues.

Questions:

1. Is there a way of assigning the USA licenses (Dial plans) for the users hosted on United Kingdom Tenant

2.  As an alternate option, do we need to create tenant in respective other sites (USA, Germany, Ireland)  and host the respective users there to ease PSTN Calling traffic much faster and smoother?

3. Is there any Office 365 PSTN Breakouts global map (Like Office 365 Datacenter map) available online?

4.  As a final option can we choose Express route to make PSTN Calling traffic faster because it can route the traffic to dedicated channel? (Customer is already aware of the winroom and Network Assessment process to choose Express route)

Any  pointers would be of great help.

Many thanks in advance.

[#2]

Questions:

1. Is there a way of assigning the USA licenses (Dial plans) for the users hosted on United Kingdom Tenant

I think you can set this by re-setting the user's region set-msoluser -usagelocation, I do this when I have global tenants with users all over the world and need the correct numbers to show up when assigning them.  I haven't tried flipping it for a highly mobile user, but easy to test.  Basically, with the right regions set, you can have a US user using US numbers and calling US people with only a domestic calling plan, and in the same tenant have a UK user using UK numbers calling UK people with the GB region set.

2.  As an alternate option, do we need to create tenant in respective other sites (USA, Germany, Ireland)  and host the respective users there to ease PSTN Calling traffic much faster and smoother?

I don't believe this is necessary.  Though careful with German an EU law, there may be other data requirements that may have you considering a separate tenant. 

3. Is there any Office 365 PSTN Breakouts global map (Like Office 365 Datacenter map) available online?

I'm not sure about this.

4.  As a final option can we choose Express route to make PSTN Calling traffic faster because it can route the traffic to dedicated channel? (Customer is already aware of the winroom and Network Assessment process to choose Express route)

I'm not sure what you mean exactly here.  But I wouldn't expect Express Route to make PSTN Calling faster, it would just give you the opportunity to have a bit more control over quality.

[#3]

I believe that location based routing is on the roadmap. I am not absolutely certain what "location based routing means" so I may be wrong but it would appear to suggest that rather than hit the UK datacentre then ping back across the Atlantic if your UK based licensee happens to be visiting the US and is calling a US PSTN number it would instead enter the closest (in IP terms) Azure network endpoint and then route from there. Anyway, I would suggest that starting to ask about location based routing would be a good starting point to get a handle upon your point.

[#4]

Thank you very much, Anthony and Nicholas,

Customer is looking for more clarity on the below:

• So if I have a US user assigned within my UK tenant they will only use local domestic minutes ?
• Please can you give me some kind of idea of meeting route – e.g. my user in the USA creates a meeting is this hosted in the USA if he is on a UK tenant as long as we have done the set region on the user ? How do we make sure the quality is good for this type of meeting ?

Many thanks again!!!

[#5]

Seems to me that the thinking is slightly confused, in that, as far as I know, there is no concept of a UK or US tenant. There is a tenant (although I do believe that it is possible to have more than one) and within that tenant there are users. The users are individually assigned a location as distinct from the tenant itself having a location per se.  The billing is then based upon that user's assigned location. So a user assigned a UK location but visiting the US and making a call to a US PSTN would use international minutes, but if while still visiting the US he calls a UK PSTN he would be using domestic minutes. I think the question of how the packets are actually routed is a quite separate question from what the billing algorithm does.  I think that at the moment the UK user visiting the US and calling a US PSTN would find that the packets go first to the UK and then back to the US but I am not absolutely certain about that. Obviously that is highly inefficient and not conducive to good call quality. I THINK that location based routing is intended to ensure that the traffic is not unnecessarily routed through the data centre in the users assigned location but would break out at the point closest to the Azure Network end point that they are accessing the network through and route appropriately. I am fairly sure that the Azure endpoint the user access the system through is assigned through a dynamic DNS. So, if your UK user is in the US, and the closest (in IP terms) Azure Network Endpoint is in New York his call would travel over the public internet to New York and then onto London within Azure rather than over the pubic network all the way to the Azure end point in London.  However, I could be wrong about the situation regarding the routing of the packets within Azure both now and also when subject to "location based routing" because I am not exactly certain what location based routing means. It is really a guess on my part - I hope an educated guess and the obviously highly inefficient routing of traffic unnecessarily across the Atlantic twice is part of what informs that guess as it is such an obvious thing that all parties would want to avoid.

I guess if you had a US user and they made a lot of calls to the UK PSTN you could assign that user who is physically in the US  a UK location and use UK domestic minutes but you are not supposed to do that because unlike consumer skype, skype for business is a 911 replacement service. I guess that if it was obvious that the user (or a lot of users) was in fact just a US user that had been improperly assigned a UK location Microsoft would at some point get upset about it and I am pretty sure it would be a breach of the terms of service.

I hope that is helpful.