sundance-communications.com Forums Telephony Discussion Phone & VoIP Systems Nortel Telephones & Systems answer mode

Recently installed a CICS 7.1 with a single CI trunk card. Everything went smoothly and calls were working fine (incoming and outgoing) and then all of a sudden incoming calls were not ringing on the phones. When a call would come in, the line indicator on the phones would light up, but it would not ring. If I pressed the line button, it would say "Line in Use." Outgoing calls worked fine. I dialed in w/ my cell, and after the first ring, something would pick up the line and I could hear what seemed like a secondary dial tone. I wasn't sure what was going on, as it only appeared on lines that were set to Appear & Ring. Lines that were set to Appear Only, I could call that line and pick it up w/o a problem. I started digging into programming, and the only difference that I noted, was that under Trunk/Line Data of Lines programming, there was a section that said "Answer Mode" and it was set to Auto. This only appeared for the lines that were set for Appear & Ring. The Appear Only line did not have this setting. This was the only difference (other than line appearance setting) that I could distinguish between the lines. So the lines that were not working correctly, I set their Answer Mode to Manual, and then all of a sudden everything was working correctly.

I looked up in my Nortel documentation, but I cannot find a clear description of what Answer Mode is or why it would be used. Can anyone tell me what this feature is and what it would be used for?

Check to see if the lines somehow got programmed as Auto answer DISA lines.

Thanks for the reply. I don't believe that they are. Don't recall seeing that in programming, and I've went thru the whole setup multiple times. I will just leave it in manual answer mode, as everything is working just as it should. Just curious what answer mode is and what its intended purpose would be.

As MP said its for DISA. Direct Inward System Access. It enables you to dial directly to a set from an outside line. Usually its only used on a single line. Theres also other programing involved with this.

Ok. That is the information I was looking for. Thank you.