sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Vodavi Telephones & Systems STS & Caller ID "OUT OF AREA"

Thanks Everyone! It WAS the phone company. They got the phone number to show up but the name still says "OUT OF AREA" they are still working on it but know it is their problem and not mine. Thanks a lot!

What RedTail was trying to tell you is that in order for the caller information to pass through the many switches (sometimes referred to as central offices), the switches all must speak the same language.

The standard "language" is SS7 (Signaling System 7) developed about 20 years ago. Still, a call might travel through a switch that is not equipped for SS7, thus losing the call information.

You might simply make a call across the street, yet the call may travel halfway across the country and back. This is especially true when your service is provided by a competitor (CLEC) that doesn't have "neighborhood" central offices; rather switches in major cities only. A phone call may pass through many switches and any one of them may cause caller data to be lost.

Still, the fact that your problem was constant, not just occasionally, was likely due to the local central office as you have found. We have also found that outgoing caller ID information can be lost-here goes:

We spent weeks trying to explain why a customer in DC who called his mother in upstate NY, it would display "OUT OF AREA", yet anyone else calling her had their name show up just fine, even when calling from other DC numbers.

It turned up being an issue in a switch run by QWEST in Colorado! QWEST was not the carrier for the originator OR the recipient of the call! They were just a contractor handling a portion of the call between Washington, DC and New York. Strange but true.



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Ed
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How come there's always enough time to go back and fix it a second time?