A client of mine has eight Verizon FIOS analog lines that are delivered to two Avaya IP Office analog ATM4 trunk cards. All of their calls are picked up/answered live, so no attendant pickup during working hours. We deliver these analog calls to a hunt group to ring several users in the front office.
Because of a very specific issue with FIOS handling of caller ID in combination with IP office analog cards, the following occurs:
- The analog port, set to Loop Start ICLID picks up the ring.
- The call is delivered directly to a “main” hunt group.
- If a member of the hunt group picks up the call on the second ring, they will hear a loud buzzing/flutter for 1 second. It sounds like this (recorded from speakerphone). The sound is inaudible to the remote caller, FYI.
There is no real “fix” per se without completely disabling caller id on the carrier or IPO side, but there is a workaround which requires Embedded Voicemail, Voicemail Lite, or Voicemail Pro by utilizing “announcements.”
- Enable Announcements for your “main” hunt group (or extension if not using hunt groups), but don’t record one.
- Set announcement wait time to 0
- Set post announcement tone to “Ringing”
- Turn off 2nd and repeat announcements.
Because the call is picked up by the attendant and then routed, the crackle usually heard by the person picking up the call is intercepted by the “fake” attendant announcement. Note that this workaround will occupy a single VM channel for about .5 secs when the call is picked up. Also, caller ID continues to work well with the fix above.
Yet another alternative is to disable caller ID at the Verizon side, or set your IP Office analog lines to “Loop Start” with no CID. Of course this will disable caller ID which is usually a dealbreaker in this day and age.
I’ve been experimenting with an Avaya IP Office Small Office Edition (4T, 8A, 3 VOIP) in preparation for rolling a few out to clients in the next couple of months. I finally got around to hooking up my Vonage V-Portal to the IPO and was excited to start testing.
To my chagrin, there was really serious local echo (hear myself talking) on my 4620 IP phone when using either of my two Vonage channels. This ECHO issues was isolated to external calls on the Vonage device. I spent 3 hours experimenting in the Avaya Manager on both the VoIP extension forms and the Trunk configurations trying to fix it to no avail. Sometimes the echo would eventually cancel out if you were on the phone long enough, but there was definitely something very wrong with my configuration.
I was Googling and found a forum post mentioning something about the impedance on the line being a possible cause for Echo on analog lines in an IPO environment. So I tried each of the Impedance settings and sure enough the Impedance setting “Alternative 2″ fixed the echo 99%. Other’s mentioned this change fixing POTS lines too. Who knows, maybe it applies to more VoIP ATAs as well. Keep me posted in the comments.
UPDATE
I also found that disabling HANDSET/HEADSET AGC (Auto Gain Control in the system menu) helps eliminate voice clipping in conjunction with the V-Portal.
UPDATE 2
I gave up trying to use a V-PORTAL with my IPO. The call quality wasn’t very good, with lots of clipping. I don’t know if this is a Vonage issue or something to do with IPO talking to Vonage. I ended up moving my lines to a SIP trunk with Vitelity. I will post a blog entry detailing how I got that working (easy) soon.