US Airways does this, too. I agree with everything you've said, including the 800-pound gorilla comment. As such, we've been using US Airways and AT&T's Business number (800-222-3000) as test numbers when doing interop because of this very issue. - Darren Schreiber -- On 7/27/11 1:05 PM, "Jay Hennigan" <jay at west.net> wrote:
On 7/27/11 6:28 AM, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
I've had numerous customers ask for longer ringback timeouts on the calling side; it turns out that the above is a /very/ common practice for toll-free numbers. The menus and hold music are all "ringback" messages, and the call isn't actually "answered" until a human agent gets on the line. As many of us are unfortunately aware from our own experience calling customer (dis)service lines, that can easily exceed five minutes.
The menus? Really?
I have had issues with this and as far as I can tell, the menus should not be considered ringing.
We have had reports of DTMF failures navigating the IVR of toll-free numbers from time to time. American Airlines is one specific example.
What we have found is that there really isn't a DTMF issue, but that the forward audio path is being disabled until answer somewhere enroute. This is to me the correct behavior and was implemented at least a decade ago as a fraud prevention measure to prevent an endpoint from simply not providing answer supervision and conversing.
From what I recall, the forward audio path is *supposed* to be blocked until the call is answered. Reverse audio is enabled for ringback tones, intercept recordings, and the like.
For a toll-free end user to deliberately not provide answer supervision (and thus start billing) and expect to process DTMF into a menu or for that matter just carry on a conversation seems fraudulent.
Of course American Airlines and the like is kind of an 800-pound gorilla and trying to get them or their carrier to alter this behavior of a free ride navigating the menus would be an uphill battle.
So I could theoretically have a toll-free number that would have a menu, "Press 1 to hear an audiobook recording of 'War and Peace'; press 2 to hear the 1812 overture..." and run it for free? Doesn't seem kosher.
-- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay at impulse.net Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/ Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV _______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops