+1 on this answer. Very few carriers (from the origination side) will allow a call to ring forever, so the best answer to this is to test a few of the relevant providers (Major cell carriers, local iLEC landline, etc.) and see when they time out, and then let that be the limiting factor. This will be easy to show the customer, of course these types of customers are rarely influenced by facts. Not to mention there isn't a sane human in the world that will stay on the line for 5 minutes when the line is just ringing and ringing. Way before that time they'll hang up and try your customer's competitor, who probably has an AA that answers immediately. -Scott -----Original Message----- From: voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org [mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org] On Behalf Of Jay Hennigan Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2011 2:34 PM To: voiceops at voiceops.org Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] Letting a phone ring forever? On 7/26/11 11:09 AM, Carlos Alvarez wrote:
We have a customer who has asked us to let his main line ring "forever" or at least five minutes. As a standard practice we forcefully hang up on an unanswered call at 90 seconds if the customer has turned off voicemail and auto-attendants. It seems wrong to let a line ring forever or even for minutes at a time, and I recall something in the back of my head about a traditional industry-standard limit.
Interfacing to conventional telephony devices gets kind of sticky in these cases. If the line hasn't been seized and returned answer supervision then there is no way to signal the originating device to tear down the call from the end switch. The originating switch can time out and tear down the call without supervision of course. And that is likely to be the issue with honoring your customer's request. The main obstacle to letting it ring forever is that even if *you* set a ridiculously long timeout, the rest of the world calling his main line isn't going to be inclined to follow suit. Virtually all carriers on the originating side will treat the call as abandoned after some time that is likely going to be less than 300 seconds. Cellular carriers especially are going to be aggressive about tearing down calls that are consuming airtime and not generating revenue. Likewise long distance and international carriers. Back in the good old days of various colored boxes, it wasn't uncommon to have calls that weren't officially answered (OK, technically they were *very* briefly answered) that would last for an hour or more. I don't personally know how any of this was done, of course. ;-) -- 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