Hi Guys,
I was just wondering...
Any way to put a intercom line on hold?
Thanks
Should be able to. It a talk path with lights and everything.
Yeah I would think you could but I guess you cant... Maybe in order to put a line on hold it must have a 400 line card. In one of my KSU's I have a Teltone intercom and the other KSU a manual intercom card and you cant put the line on hold. I wonder if you have to rewire something.
The accepted policy and practice is that there is no reason to have a HOLD capability on an intercom, because it is a private, common connection, that will not fall off if/when one participant disconnects, unlike a CO or PBX connection, where after a certain amount of time, the connection will drop after one participant hangs up.
Imagine that an intercom call is placed: Both parties are speaking. One party gets another call, or needs to select another button for some reason. The guy at the other end of the original ICM call just sits there and waits, until the first guy comes back on the line.
We are talking about a legacy style ICM, where no switching takes place. A manual ICM, such as a 401 KTU, or a DICM, using a 207, 247, 407, 424, etc KTU (all WE) use a common talking path, not under control of a switching equipment that has time-out features. More sophisticated systems will knock down a connection if one end abandons the call.
Since (in the old days) a manual or simple dial ICM in an office got used all the time, putting a line ckt with HOLD capability in the equation would be counter-intuitive. Some bozo would leave the ICM on HOLD, and the rest of the people in the office would be unable to use the ckt, because there is no CPC on an ICM.
I remember having this discussion about tie line cards. Same rules basically apply. It's a manually set up call that won't tear down unless both parties disconnect, yet the ITT cards would let you place a tie line call on hold but the western card wouldn't. Arthur is spot on, there's really no need. Also... how would that work, electrically? Both sets, and generally all the sets would be bridged together, at least with a common path intercom circuit. The A leads of one set would always be connected, keeping the line from going on hold. Maybe with a multi-path intercom where each set has its own ICM circuit, but I personally have never seen such a setup. Does one even exist?
The more sophisticated intercoms, developed due to the "because we can" school of engineering, had features that no one needed. They required a separate pair to each station, (or sometimes not) and a separate lamp lead, too. The 6A (with up to, ISTR, 3 talking links), was the first, followed by other manufacturers' improvements and developments, (TelTone made a small, packaged version of the coffin-sized 6A by WE) culminating with the AT&T "Diaogue" ® system. They started to become more PBX than ICM. At that point, HOLD was useful.
Yup. The 6B Dialog system had all kinds of useless PBX-like functions and required the full four-wire connection to each station in order for it to happen. Tone Commander's ML-8000 offered similar functionality, but I still fail to understand why anyone would talk on the intercom that long. Maybe it's just me.
I have tried it with the nortel 6x16 and what it does is makes the system go back on hook.