[asterisk-users] Phantom Rings

[Brent Davidson]

Jon Pounder wrote:
> I had the phantom rings for years, once a day same time roughly every  
> day, finally just got annoyed enough one day I trapped the telco on  
> the phone with me till I finally got to talk to the right person. The  
> "right person" knew instantly what I was talking about after months of  
> previous denials. On DMS switches what you need to insist be added to  
> your customer line profile is something called "NLT" or no line test.  
> The "wrong person" can even look it up if you tell them the name of it  
> - imagine that eh ?
>   
Unfortunately the tech I spoke to said the switch we're connected to is 
so old it has no built-in test capabilities.  To run any sort of line 
tests the line has to be disconnected from the switch and connected to 
an external test set.  I guess that's one of the things you deal with 
when the boss decides to serve only rural markets.  It would be hard to 
find locations any more rural than where our branches are.  At present I 
have ztmonitor streaming all line activity to a file.  I've got plenty 
of hard drive space so I can record all day if I need to.  According to 
the manager of the branch in question, there were at least 50 phantom 
calls yesterday, but there has only been 1 this morning.  The other 
curiosity here is that reviewing my asterisk logs all of the phantom 
calls are on 1 line and swapping ports, the calls follow the line.  It's 
easy to spot the phantom calls in the logs because they always mention 
dropped frames (probably because of the dialtone coming from the Analog 
line card).

Thanks,
Brent