[asterisk-users] Transfer Call to Cell Phone

[John Faubion]

>Polycom Phones
>1. New call
>2. Press 9 access outside line
>3. Dial Cell Number
>4. Transfer the call that way.

Once you initiate a new call you will tie up the second line. Your asterisk
box will now be bridging the two lines. The lines will stay tied up until
the salesman drops the call.

One method you might be able to employ here would be to add a call transfer
to the pots lines. Then you would need to send a hook flash to the pots
line, and dial the salesman's number when you get the dial tone. Then,
depending on how your local Telco supports the call transfer feature, you
may be able to free up the line. Not all Telcos support this the same way as
some consider it a method of toll avoidance and thus drop the call. This
would be possible in an area where a call from party A to party B is a local
call and the call from party B to party C is a local call but a call from
party A to party C would be a toll call. Since the call from party A to
party C is a toll call, the Telco may opt to drop the call. If the transfer
part works, there may even be a way to setup the dial plan to intercept your
phones call transfer feature and use a 1-2 digit code to select which phone
number to send out. I have not done this but I think it is reasonable as
I've heard of home users doing it.

By the second option, are you talking about the TDMA/GSM gateway? If so, yes
this is pretty slick. We considered it initially as well. Our decision not
to use it was based on the fact that many of our agents are on different
mobile plans. I think when we requested the info from the agents we had 6
different wireless companies represented. Since Sprint/Nextel,
Cingular/AT&T, T-Mobile don't like to play nicely with other, we didn't
expect to see any real savings from the free mobile to mobile calls. This
was mainly due to the fact that we don't pay for the agents phones and thus
we can't really tell the agents which carriers to use. I do know of a couple
of installations where the company does provide the phones and I understand
the savings can be significant. I was told by friend that the box they
installed paid for itself in just a couple of months. But their phone were
already on the same plan.

John