atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems 1A2 and Comkey Telephones & Systems I guess I deserve it

Thought you guys might get a chuckle out of this.
I guess after getting a taste of the cool-aid I deserve what I had coming. Today I noticed one of my voip lines wasn't sending the proper CPC signal, causing abandoned calls to stay on hold forever. Like all day, after my brother in law put me on hold and forgot about me and I come home at 9:30 at night to see the little line light winking at me across the garage. So I reboot the gizmo, and no love. The other identical gizmo is working right, and the other two voip devices (comcast and obihai) are working just fine. Each drops battery for a short time and lets the system release like its supposed to do. I spent an hour on the phone with someone from, I'm guessing India, trying to explain what calling party control is and why it needs to work again. To his credit he listened to me and -finally- understood what it is and why it's important that it works. My trouble ticket was elevated to the next level of support. We'll see.

Good luck getting it fixed!

Sam

My frustration began when I was putting in the Melco A-lead adapters I bought off another member. These are supposed to be able to take a call off hold in addition to the usual lighting the line lamp and halting ringing. On the comcast line, the adapter worked flawlessly. On the ooma lines, not so much. I had first wired them with t&r on the station side of the line card. In this configuration the only line that I could retrieve off hold was the comcast line. The ooma lines would not release. Then I wired t&r to the CO side of the line card and they seem to work... ok. There's a little lag before they release, but they do release. The comcast line works perfectly on either side, with no lag. As soon as I pick up on of the SLT's it releases instantly. My only guess is it must be a loop current problem. On hook battery is 48.1V comcast, 47.9 ooma #1, and 47.5 ooma #2. Off hook comcast was 9v and both ooma's were in the 6V area. I don't have a meter that does mA, so I can only make a rough guess based on the on/off hook voltage differences as tested with a 2500 set. One of my 1A2 phones won't dial anymore on the ooma lines, the touch tones sound all distorted. I've checked polarity and it's fine. The same phone dials fine on the lines connected to the partner and the obihai. That's my other low current clue. I'm partly just venting my frustrations and partly wondering how others have dealt with some of these issues. I looked at loop current boosters, but they're too expensive for a hobby setup. Any thoughts anyone?

@ Sam, I know, but at the moment I've got nothing better to do, so I don't mind fighting my way through the incompetence till I find someone who knows how to check the little box that says "Send CPC?" On my C*net ATA's it's that easy since they are unlocked. They all send the proper loop disconnect to my equipment. This locked up, proprietary stuff.... I'm at the mercy of an idiot 9000 miles away...


I can't be the only fool with a 1A2 running on Voip lines...

No, you're not.

Thanks, Uncle Arthur!

Chris,
Send them this link https://www.sandman.com/cpcbull.html
Good Luck

It's funny, John. I already have that Sandman page open in my browser. So far they sent me an email saying they changed some settings and to reboot the device. I did that and it still doesn't work. Then I did the online chat, which I think is a robot anyways, and they said they did a firmware update. Rebooted again and still no luck. On the phone with them now trying second level support. Amazing... At least this gentleman sounds as though English is his first language.

I can't believe something as simple as a battery drop could be so complicated to get right.

Especially since the box CAN do it and USED to do it in the past.


EDIT: I just finished on the phone with the rep. They are going to send me a new device!! Hip hip hooray!

Your youthful, boundless enthusiasm for a potentially disappointing result is so refreshing to us old farts...or, to put it another way..."fat chance."

Just when I was starting to like you..... HEY! Wait a minute.... Didn't you promise me some 1A2 stuff for Christmas?

Christmas of what year?

Do I need to show you the email?


EDIT: Email sent

Now I'm curious. If you plug a plain old s/l set into the box and make a call and the far end hangs up and you don't what do you hear? If you do the same thing monitoring the line and both ends hang up what do you hear in monitor on the butt set?
Inquiring minds want to know. Come on Arthur send the guy a 401a, a 403 or a 400D card. I know you must have a garage full. LOL.

If I plug a s/l right into the box and the other party hangs up it almost immediately returns to dial tone. A buttset in monitor, I haven't tried. I've been pretty busy the last few days. They have called me a couple more times about the issue. Today they wanted to know what kind of phone system I have connected to it. As if it matters. The problem would be the same if I had an old answering machine on it. I'd have a tied up line till it ran out of tape/memory. I didn't dare tell them it was a 1A2, they would be even more clueless than they are now. I told 'em I had the ACS behind it. At least the dope recognized the name Avaya. I wonder if modern answering machines can detect DT and hang up since most voip crap today can't even do a simple loop disconnect.

Arthur knows better than to send me a bunch of crusty 400d cards! An ITT 403..... that could be interesting, but we all know Arthur is a Bell/WECO guy. And I have a Valcom 19 station tone/rotary dial intercom with dial tone and ringback, and a melco 10 station tone icom with dt and rb. I have two 401's on a shelf (I think they're 401B's) that I'll never use.

I just tested it again to be sure. I took my trusty western electric 2500D and plugged it into that box. I called into it with my cell and answered. (Puts out nice ring voltage-Loud and crisp) Anyway, I hung up the cell while lightly blowing into the transmitter of the 2500 (listening to the sidetone). Forget about listening to the sidetone die if the loop opened, it went INSTANTLY back to dial tone. Maybe I can win the powerball and just buy the local CO and not have to worry about this crap.

I may be missing something, or my reading comprehension skills have diminished- have you tried connecting the 'bad' line to a different port on your 1A2 just to prove it's NOT your equipment, or swapping known good stuff with suspect stuff to track the symptoms? It sounds like you have two distinct issues here- possible low loop current and no CPC signal. No current and low current aren't the same thing.

Your reading comprehension skills have not diminished. This thread has been wandering, and that's mostly my fault. I have both problems. There is definitely no CPC on this "line" and it also has low loop current. It's VoIP, and I knew going in, I was apt to have issues like this. The CPC problem has cropped up only recently. It was giving a proper loop disconnect up until maybe a few weeks ago. The problem of low loop current has probably been there all along. I previously had this line going into my Avaya ACS with the 1A2 behind the ACS, connected to station ports. The ACS was likely masking the low loop current the entire time. I switched things around after getting some Melco S64-1 A-lead adapters, putting the 1A2 ahead of the ACS, and using the A-lead adapters wired so when an ACS phone is used, I get A-lead closure on the 1A2. They also allow me to retrieve calls on the ACS that were placed on hold on the 1A2. Previously, the ACS would have been supplying the loop current to the 1A2, and now that the 1A2 is ahead of the ACS, the sets are relying on the loop current directly from the VoIP devices. I only have one set that's really having issues with the low current, and it's a crappy SC wall set in my furnace room. I have one I can swap it with that will work. The other low loop current problem was the Melco A-lead adapters wouldn't trigger reliably, but I have changed the wiring so they seem to be working correctly and reliably now. I can --tolerate-- the low loop current problem since I have a work around, but this lack of CPC is a no-go. I thought about one of Sandman's CPC generators, or a Viking CPC-1, but the cost is prohibitive for a hobby setup. Unless someone wants to part with a used one for a reasonable amount, I'm stuck fighting the incompetence of a VoIP provider's "Tech Support" team. I have provisioned a dozen VoIP adapters for use with the collectors network (C*Net) and I know how easy it is to check the little box next to "Send CPC", but that seems to be lost on the minimum wage earning dope a couple continents away, whom I am at the mercy of.

Keep in mind that these third-party CPC generators require the detection of silence or reorder tone in order to operate, so I wouldn't waste the money on them. What you really need is a loop extender that replicates a line with 'real' voltage and current. Viking's LLA-1 will provide this, but as you said, for a hobby project, the cost may be prohibitive:

TAKE A LOOK HERE

Ed, that's a cool device, but it says it only passes CPC, it doesn't generate one. Both CPC generators I mentioned will provide a CPC from silence, busy tone, reorder tone, dial tone, and even DTMF tones. The problem is the cost. The affected line goes instantly back to dial tone, and if you leave it off hook long enough it goes to reorder and eventually to howler tone. I could use one of the CPC generators, but 75-90 bucks just so I don't have to keep an eye on line lights.... I'm still trying to get these fools to fix the damned device. They haven't said they won't, and they did say they were going to replace it. Time will tell, it's to soon to tell if that was BS or not. If it turns out I'm stuck with this thing with no CPC, I'll start evaluating my options. I may get the CPC generator, I may can the service, and I might just suck it up. I don't want to do the third thing, because that's just another win for outsourced tech support. It's a pretty sad state of affairs that someone can be so brilliant to come up with the fancy electronics we have today, only to be made useless because companies won't pay for tech support that actually knows something about the product they are supposed to support.

Is that called "progress"

Mike Sandman tells the story pretty well. This is oh-so-true, and a good chuckle, to boot. Click here to read Sandman's take.

So, to update the saga... They did actually send me a new device. It came today, in the midst of me redoing my backboard. I swapped it out for the new one. Fortunately I had gotten far enough along to have the partner back together and wired in. I plunked the gizmo in place of the old one and..... big let down. It does the same thing. They must have the account provisioned wrong or something as opposed to a setting specific to the device. Back to India.

Have you tried asking for advice on the VoIP list? There has been lots of traffic over the last year or so about this topic.

Had never even heard of the VoIP list....

The C*NET guys.

Sorry. Duh.

Wicked old thread, I know. The idiots FINALLY fixed the CPC issue and it now drops abandoned calls like it's supposed to. Just thought I'd update. Sometimes you can win.

Who said there was no God?

Glad it worked out. Must have taken divine intervention.

Sam

I looked into their forums and apparently MANY subscribers were complaining of answering machines, voicemails, and the like recording a lot of dial tone. It seems that for Ooma subscribers the place to go to get things done is their forum board. The mods and admins on the board are the engineers and developers for Ooma, so they have the ability to get things done quickly if you ask nicely. I was reading a few threads about call quality issues and within hours of saying there was an issue, a mod would report back that the issue was resolved and what they did. For example changing the default audio codec, assigning the box to a closer server, or changing some setting within the box that the user doesn't have access to. People would reply that the problem was solved or wasn't. Usually it was. Evidently the CPC problem was so widespread that it required a mass firmware update, which is why it took so long to get resolved. Now there is a setting (still only available to them) to toggle the CPC on and off and to set how long the duration is. I forced my box to do a firmware update today and lo and behold it will release a held line on my partner if the caller hangs up. My faith in humanity is slightly restored.

"My faith in humanity is slightly restored."

Tomorrow's another day. Just sayin'.

Always the optimist, Arthur...