atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Avaya - Lucent Telephones & Systems IP Office POTS line testing

I know most of you do not like line appearances on IP Office but with out them how does the end user verify that a POTS line actuly works short of calling each number and wating for the phone to ring or VM to answer?

I have a FD Dispatch office that needs to verify that all it's POTS lines (22) work, the ones that have dreaded line apperances are easy just press the buttons. It's the ones that do not have appearances or are part of an outgoing line group that are the problem.

Any Ideas how to test the lines that do not have appearances every 12 hours at the end user level?

You could put each line into a unique group, arrange ARS to overflow, then create a shortcode to access each group individually (not the associated ARS group so that your tests don't overflow to next group). Make the shortcode something line **01 for line 1, etc. It'll take an hour to configure, but will provide dial access without buttons.
Mike

If you have half on the phone now. Create a second user with teh balance of the trunk appearances on it. Then you could hot desk to that user to see the ones you can not on teh full time user...

I got to ask,...... why would you have (22) POTS lines and not a T-1 or PRI?

Also, do you have access to the "system status" program?

Not all of the lines belong to the same agency and vendor so it would be hard to get them all together.

In addtion the reliablity of Verizons T1 circuits in our location stinks, they deliver them over HDSL on realy bad copper. Every time we have a lightning storm with a close by strike the existing point to point T-1's loose connection and take 30 to 90 seconds to resync. I feel that puting all the lines that the public uses to report an emergency on a single circuit that could drop out during a storm would not be the best thing to do.

Also some of the lines have dual appearances in a backup dispatch office, do not know if a T-1 could do that.

Forgot to mention that some of the lines also appear in a backup comdial system in the event that the Avaya needs to be rebooted for maintenance or goes down. Cannot tolerate even a 30 second outage when emergenc calls are involved

Well it may not be such a good idea to have them test by directly accessing the line.

I was on site today checking a few other things and ran into this problem. One of the secondary alarm lines is busy when called from the outside, if you go on it at the demarc (with all other equipment removed) you can get dial tone and place calls. The caller ID on the cell I called indicates the correct # so it's not a stolen or miss ID pair. Does not attempt to ring then trip, it's just solid busy.

Called Verizon and they tell me it will be fixed by Tuesday, Told them thats not acceptable as this is a line the public uses to report a fire. I streched the truth a little, it's realy a roll over in the event the main number is busy.

They called me back at 6pm and said it will be dispatched first thing in the morning, they insist it is a cable problem. I would think a line that can dial out and is not noisy should not make it busy but they insist it's not a switch problem.

Guess we will see who is right in the morning

Well Verizon was here and gone in 1/2 hour. Tech goes to the demarc, pulls the bridging clips and tests with the buttset. Then says why am I here the problem is in the switch.

20 minutes on the phone with someone and the problem is fixed.

Told them yesterday it was not a line problem, only took 24 hours for them to respond this time.

Back to my POTS testing question, I guess I have to rethink my logic of having the user call up dial tone once a day to see if the line is good. Never would have caught this problem that way as I had dial tone and could dial out, it was incoming calls that got a busy.

Think I am going to go with speed dials and have the dispatchers call each line every 24 hours to verify it can receive calls as that is the important part to us. If the public can not call the FD in an emergency it's a problem.

You will want to watch the incoming calls in System Status, to be sure that they are actually hitting the correct line, and not hunting over a busy line or a line that is shorted out.

Good point, the ones I am most concerned with (alarm lines) have appearance buttons but that did not help at all with the last Verizon failure.

They do test the lines that have appearance buttons every day but only by pressing the button and hearing dial tone. The last failure had a line that had dial tone and could make calls but was busy when called from outside.

Going to have them call the lines now and also busy out the main number to test the Verizon hunt. Had they been doing that they would have known they had a dead line before I found it yesterday. I only found it because I was doing some re-cableing and tested the old for proper operation before I tore it apart to do the new.

Not the first tome before work tests have saved me from the "it worked before you fixed it" sindrome