We’ve just installed A@H 2.1, with 2 Duxbury ISDN BRI Cards, all works well. We are trunking to 2 other A@H boxes in the UK (we’re Based in Pretoria, South Africa). All is well.
Touble is with Sip phones, hard or soft. On our box in pretoria (this is the A@H 2.1 box) if you make an outside call, which goes through the ISDN cards, the ring indication tone comes from the SIP rather than from the terminating exchange where the call is terminating. Interestingly enough, when one dials an outside number, you get a burst of the South African Ringing tone from the terminating exchange before the sip phone gives its own ring tone. We cant have this, becuase, for one, our staff are acustomed to the South African ringing tone, and second, on some of our cell networks, when you call a cell number, and the subscriber does not have voice mail enabled, and is switched off/out of range, you get a message telling you so, and this does not send answer supervision to the ISDN, so from the sip phones you get ringing tone.
Interestingly enough, when our UK based * boxes, make calls through the ISDN channels in pretoria, this does not happen., we’re still using 1.3 in the UK.
Does anyone know how we could work around this bug bear proplem ? Its minor yet rather irritating.
Almost all phones (hard and soft phones) have some sort of “region” setting. You might try to find one that produces tones that you find acceptable.
In some phones (sipura-841 and cisco-941 come to mind) you have to define the tones individually. It means doing some research to know the definition of your countries tones, but once you do it, it’s a permanent setting.
In all cases with VOIP phones, the call progress tones heard by people placing calls are generated by the phone itself (or the software in the case of SIP softphones). The tones are not generated by the Asterisk box.
If your phones or software can’t somehow detect your region or has no way to be manually altered, then I’m afraid you’re left with the tones you hear. It’s up to the manufacturer of the phone or software to support regional tone settings.
The regional tone settings in Asterisk only affect Digium boards that may be inserted in the Asterisk system. Making changes there won’t change the tones you hear in SIP phones.
Ah, there is a work around, you can get asterisk to give SIP phones call indication tones, with out answering the channel. It gives tones as defined in indications.conf. You need to fiddle with maro-dial for this happen, works nicely However, with 2.1, its a little hit and mis. But I worked around that too., but not the way I would like.
I am aware where the ring tones etc come from, how ever, it looks better if everything sounds the same, and works more or less the same.
With Zaptel Cards, the tones that they use, are not defined in indications.conf, but some where in a file called zonedata.c, but I altered that, and it makes no difference, any one know where the real file is ?
Again, a work around with this, was to fiddle with macro-dial in extensions.conf
2.1 is slighty strange, in that, if you make a call, internally, the modifications in macro-dial do work, but if you make a call out over a trunk, it does not. Something with the way that 2.1 handles sip messages that is different to 1.3 and 1.5. But thats not a problem, and I have managed a work around for out going calls on the ISDN on the 2.1 box, by answering the channel, not Ideal, but for now, it stops people from complaining.
However, with 2.1, its a little hit and mis. But I worked around that too., but not the way I would like.