[asterisk-users] Phantom Rings

[Jon Pounder]

Quoting Brent Davidson <brent at texascountrytitle.com>:

> 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).

is that one line in the same cable bundle all the way back to the CO ?  
Could be picking up interference or something, or be half connected to  
some other line somewhere or some other weirdness. ask for a TDR  
reading of cable feet on a working and non-working line and they  
should be damn close to identical. Could also be a bridge tap picking  
up some stray signal somehow - have that checked for and disconnected.

I have also had issues before where an analog modem just plain would  
not work as the management cct on a telco supplied T1, they changed  
every piece of wire all the way back to the CO and finally decided it  
was a bad switch port, swapped the line to a new port and voila worked  
- tech figured the port was just flaky from lightning damage or  
something, so some other poor schlub will get a line on there at some  
point since it tests out ok but doesn't work. I would like to see them  
go to this effort if it was my own line with my modem - never would  
have happened. initially all the fingers were pointed at bad building  
wiring, but that was ruled out in the first 5min, until eventually all  
that was left was the switch port.





>
> Thanks,
> Brent
>
> _______________________________________________
> -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com --
>
> asterisk-users mailing list
> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
>    http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
>
>



Jon Pounder

    _/_/_/  _/    _/  _/       _/_/_/  _/    _/  _/_/_/_/
     _/    _/_/  _/  _/         _/    _/_/  _/  _/_/
    _/    _/  _/_/  _/         _/    _/  _/_/  _/
_/_/_/  _/    _/  _/_/_/_/ _/_/_/  _/    _/  _/_/_/_/


Inline Internet Systems Inc.
Thorold, Ontario, Canada

Tools to Power Your e-Business Solutions
www.inline.net
www.ihtml.com
www.ihtmlmerchant.com
www.opayc.com