Licence and channel limit

NEXIA Switch runs on a licence bound to your server. That licence states how many simultaneous calls this installation is entitled to carry — the channels. Everything else in the panel (customers, tariffs, routing, reports) is always available; what the licence governs is how much traffic you can carry at once.

Where you see it and activate it

Under Settings → Activation. You need the administrator role.

• If the server is already activated, you get the This server is activated card with three facts: the licence identifier, the number of CONCURRENT CALLS enabled, and how long it is valid for (VALID UNTIL).
• If it is not activated yet, the same screen shows the two-step activation wizard.

The state also appears at the bottom of Settings → SIP Engine, in the Licence section: state, enabled modules, and — one click away — the licence certificate.

The free licence

The free tier enables 100 concurrent calls, forever — no card, no sales call. It includes the base platform: customers, tariffs, routing, CDRs, backups and the full panel. Paid modules are not included.

You activate it from Settings → Activation, in two steps:

1. Request your key. Fill in name, phone, email and the language you want the email in. The panel sends the request together with this machine's fingerprint.
2. Paste the key. An email arrives with the activation key — in the body and as a license.token attachment. Paste it whole into step 2 and press Activate this server. The server is licensed on the spot.

The key is bound to the fingerprint of the server that asked for it: it will not work on another machine. If the email did not arrive, check spam and repeat the request — the system resends the same key, it does not issue duplicates.

The full walkthrough, including manual installation as an alternative, is in Activate your free licence.

The installation-wide channel ceiling

The licence sets how many simultaneous calls this server is entitled to carry: 100 on the free tier, or whatever your licence says. When the server is licensed, the engine's admission ceiling is set to that number — you can see it under Settings → SIP Engine → Limits in force, as Max simultaneous calls. That page is read-only on purpose, so a ceiling never moves by accident.

How it behaves in practice:

• Every call takes one channel, from answer to hang-up.
• While channels are free, calls come in normally.
• When they are all taken, the next call is refused with a service-unavailable response, rather than accepted at the cost of degrading the calls already connected. Calls in progress are left alone.
• As soon as a channel frees up, the next call gets in again. There is no queue and no penalty.

The live picture is in Settings → SIP Engine → Capacity: how many calls are up, what the ceiling is, how much headroom is left, and the real peak over the last 7 and 30 days.

The per-customer limit

Below the installation ceiling, each customer can carry their own. It lives in Users → (edit user) → Call Settings → Call Limit.

• 0 — the customer has no limit of their own: only the installation ceiling holds them back.
• Greater than 0 — the maximum simultaneous calls for that customer, across all of their traffic.

When a customer reaches their limit, their next call is refused with a busy signal and it is recorded: it shows up in Calls → Last Calls as FAILED, with the cause NEXIA_CHANNEL_LIMIT under the disposition and in the call detail. The calls that customer already had up carry on normally.

This is the tool you sell capacity with: each customer gets the channels they contracted, and none of them can eat everyone else's.

The hierarchy of limits

From broadest to most specific:

The smaller of the two always wins: a customer configured for 200 channels on a switch licensed for 100 will not get past 100.

How to see how many channels you are using

• Calls → Active Calls — the live list, one row per call, with start time, duration, source, destination, codec and both the customer and provider rates. Each row expands for the detail. The number of rows is the number of channels in use.
• Dashboard → VoIP Engine → Active Calls — just the number, refreshed every 10 seconds.
• Settings → SIP Engine → Capacity — the number against the ceiling, with the headroom left and the 7- and 30-day peaks.

Planning capacity

The number that matters is not the average, it is the peak: a licence runs out in the busiest minute of the month, not in the month's average.

1. Look at the 30-day peak in SIP Engine → Capacity and compare it against the ceiling.
2. If the peak is already brushing the ceiling, you are refusing traffic at busy hour even though the average looks calm. That is the moment to ask for more channels — before the next campaign, not during it.
3. Check Calls → Last Calls for rejections with NEXIA_CHANNEL_LIMIT: they tell you exactly which customers are running short and how much demand you are turning away.
4. Before onboarding a new customer, add the channels you plan to give them to the peak you already have. If the sum clears the ceiling, expand first.

Expanding is a licence change, not a reinstall: you activate it exactly as you did the first time, pasting the new key into Settings → Activation. Your configuration, customers and history stay exactly where they are. To ask for more channels, write to us from that same activation screen.

The caps, widest to narrowest

In all of them, 0 means no cap of its own. The smallest one wins: a client allowed 30 whose trunk allows 10 gets 10.