atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems ESI Telephones & Systems 56S with link errors

I have been haveing a problem with my office system since I moved in here. I have changed out all the cabling and cabinet and cards. When I am on the phone my display of the phone I am talking on starts showing all kind of zero's and collons and starts marking time. I have spent an hour on the phone with tech support and they said it is environmental issues I have changed extions and reprogrammed so many times I lost count. I am out of ideas as for what to look for next. If anyone has ever seen this before I would appreciate any ideas! I would hate to think that I am loosing my mind at such an early age!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What type of cable is it, and how long is the cable that the phone is on?

Cat5e and it is roughly the same distance that it was at my old office. about 20 feet. I remembered what you said in the older post and I laid about 50 feet of cable in the phone closet and ran it to this phone and even with the longer cable it still does it.

What type cable did you use to extend it? I would add more length, non-Cat 5 cable. If possible, just use a M/F amphenol (Cat 1 or Cat 3) to extend it.

Why does it matter what I extend it with?

Don't ask me why! Also don't ask why it happens to begin with. When I saw it happen on another 56S, our stations were on Cat 5e (installed by others), and very short basement runs. We used Cat 3 to extend it, and resolved the problem. I can't explain WHY it happens, I can only told you what I did to successfully resolve it.

OK I will try that.

I had a small S-class office, the handset displays would go crazy with small zeros & arrows & weird stuff happening, when I took it back to my office it worked perfectly.
The office where this was happening had a lot of electro magnetic noise, anyway I remember tech support sent a new ksu and I got it working.
Also in some under 10 seat offices some of the wiring can be a nightmare with loop out loop in things happening, you may think the ESI phone is the only thing connected to that circuit but actually there are other devices on the line.

Avalon,
When I installed it I rewired the entire building everything new and I have changed out the cabinet and wiring again and now T. S. is sending me a new cordless phone. I guess I will try that and see what happens.

This problem is on a cordless??

No it is on a 48 key phone but when the cordless is taken off of the system the problem goes away but as soon as the cordless is put back on the system the problem comes back.

That may be the added variable that causes it to occur, or that may be the red herring. Did you try my suggestion?

Just had another s-class lock up while you were chatting, told em to reboot, now working, what causes that to happen??

I did not yet try it I do not have any cat 3 here I will get some this weekend.

I had a digital cordless do the same thing on a Toshiba system, after a storm whole system went down. I pulled all the crossconnect off and re-terminated one at a time , when I got to the cordless the whole system would go down

What version of software is in the ESI system?

ESI is aware of the cordless phones causing Issues.

It is running the latest and greatest software. I spoke with T.S. just now and they told me they were aware of the cordless phone issue. I have swoped the coedless out with another one that I had in the shop and it works fine now all day no problems. I guess we will see if it comes up again.

Jules

What was the outcome????????


Walter

Walter it was apparently something in that shop. Because since I moved out and reinstalled it at home no problems.

I had the same thing happen to me twice. The first job was next to a radio station and I tried to resolve it by installing shield cat5 cable with a drain wire. This helped out somewhat but the near field was just unworkable so I had to install an analog switch. If you do have some kinda induction issue you may want to try shielded cable with a drain wire and only tie one end to ground otherwise you may get a poetical difference.
The second time this happened to me I found that two stations were to close to the switch and just added about a 50 foot service loop to each of the close exts and wala worked like a charm no problem since the install.(knock on wood) good luck.

That's why I ended up putting an extra length of 25-pair cable between the system and the block (using a male/female amphenol cable). See? I'm not crazy after all. The problems on mine were also on short runs. The system was in the basement, and the cables were run under the building, making them all very short runs.

OK, I'll add some more to this thread since the problem appears to be the same or at least similar. I have had a 56s Gen2 in service almost a year now with absolutely no problems. Just last week I added 3 extensions to the system and immediately began having display problems with ext 101. EXT 101 has been in service since the beginning. My first move was to swap the phone but to no avail, problem remains at ext 101 even with different phone. :scratch:

Grider,
If you don't mind, keep us informed where this goes, I have 2- 56s going in next week.

If you ever go back to my posts on the Sprint Protege, I had flaky problems like this with that system, rare and far and few between. FYI, we replaced every piece of equipment, ran shielded cable, and never solved the problem. The equipment we removed was installed at other sites and never had a problem. I used ferrite adapters made custom station cords, etc ,etc.

The end result was "enviormental conditions". The system was replaced with a Norstar,all new wiring, and guess what? We have different flaky problems that are not indictive to a Norstar.

Weird thing is the Sprint Protege worked for 6 years with no problems, go figure.

Walter

It's funny that I only hear about short cable issues on the small ESI systems (actually only the S-Class) whereas we've been having issues with the 600's with long drops. Locations where the legacy system worked and the ESI has issues lighting VM, greeting lights and the like.

ESI appariently found some suspect power supplys and other parts from a particular manufacturer recently that were issues. We've been shipped some "new" phones (all phones will be this type at some point soon) that fix these problems on the long drops. Interesting thing is, I heard a tech say that engineering mentioned that the short drop issue with these "new" phones could get worse!

Making your pigtails and station cables as long as reasonably possible might not be a bad idea, but we've never seen the short cable errors on any of the S-classes we've installed... :shrug:

I think it's S-Class, short cabling (possibly specific to Cat 5 cable runs), and SOMETHING ELSE (maybe) that all contribute to make the short-run problem occur.

Justin

I ran into this problem on 2 56s's with 48 key phones and short runs. One fix was with longer station cable runs.

The real fix is what PhoneSol mentioned. There was a bad run of phones. ESI TS came to my site with some "prototypes" and a new software load and fixed my issue. Have ESI run the S/N of the affected phones and get the latest software.

I know this is late posting, but better late than never.

Interesting. Do you know if that software fix is now in the latest version? Also, any way to tell which rev. phone to look for?

Thanks!

Justin

I ended up owning the particular S-Class system being discussed here. It is operating flawlessly in Portland, Oregon. It is running 4.7.14 software. I also received the telephones that were connected to this system but they have gone elsewhere.

Here's the scoop on the phone situation. The fix is in the phone firmware, not the KSU. We have had problems with phones on long runs where they will not refresh displays and voicemail lamps. These phones have serial numbers starting with 00290 (we call them 290's), we worked with ESI for awhile on this issue and they found issues with these particular phones. We were issued new phones that have serial numbers starting with 00452 (known as 452's!) that solved the problem.

The only other issue we've found is on the 452 phones when they are connected to very short runs, the display will sometimes to blank until they are "rebooted", we replace these with the 290's.

Sorry...5y, I don't. That was earlier this year a 1 reseller ago for me. The s/n's PhoneSol lists are somewhat familiar, but I'm not sure.

The intersting thing for me was that the system workd fine on 3 phones, did some odd things with 4 phones (seldom enough for you to dismiss it), and then went to hell with 5 phones (display garbled, bad call quality, could record messages).