sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Nortel Telephones & Systems Very weird problems with Partner system....

We have a customer with a Norstar Meredian phone system. It is a 0x32 cabinet with an 0x12 expansion cabinet on it. There are 4 DS cards in the system for the phone lines. There are only 8 lines connected to the phone system right now though.

This is the problem though, say someone calls in from the outside and it rings in on lines 1-4. I answer the call and every 3rd or 4th call I answer I can hear the person but there is also a very loud, clear dial tone that I am hearing. It is not faint and not distorted but just as if I were to pick up a phone and press a line. So I am talking to the person with that dial tone and I dial my cell phone number. The caller ID information on my cell phone number always shows the CID information for line 4. I answer my cell phone and it is now a three way call.

Now, if I dial line 4 directly I get some weird ringing tones, fax tones, then a recording that says "The number you have dialed is not a working number blah blah blah"

All this started happened after the customer recently changed telephone line providers. Their lines are now coming in on a T1 then onto a channel bank. The telco provider of course says it isn't them and we are going to go back out tomorrow to do some more troubleshooting but I just can't see what the problem is. Anyone run into this before?

Easy way to test.

Disconnect your Norstar from the channel bank.

Put a tone on channel bank line one and put your butt set on line two and see if you hear a bleed from the tone. If so then you have a bad channel bank.

Repeat this test with the tone on line one and the butt set on line two, then line three, then line four, then line five, then line six, then line seven and finally line eight.

Then put the tone on line two and the butt set on line three, then line four, then line five, then line six, then line seven and finally line eight.

Then put the tone on line three and the butt set on line four, then line five, then line six, then line seven and finally line eight.

Then put the tone on line four, and the butt set on line five, then line six, then line seven and finally line eight.

Anytime you hear a significant bleed through of the tone, you have a bad channel unit. This is the same test you would do for standard dial tones.

Yeah, I will make sure and test that tomorrow. Last night we were pushed out of there without really getting to test anything so tomorrow is when we will really get to mess with it. I will give that try though.

Well we went out there today and all of a sudden everything that was going wrong is fixed. We made at least 100 phone calls and there never was a time that it messed up. But Grande says they never touched the router...Yeah...Suuuurreee...