The Great Phone Switch

[vakkotaur]

We had our phone system switched over at work. Now a fancy-schmancy digital system, rather than the aging analog system that while it ran, was starting to get difficult to repair. Overall the changes are superficial. It's a phone. It still rings and gets answered, it still can be dialed (for "poke" values of "dial") out. There are a couple new features and all the old ones, or something close enough.

The changes that affect me are a different ringer and having an LCD for caller almost ID. Now an electronic doodle-oodle-oodle-oop rather than a real ring. I can change tone and volume, but am stuck with the same doodle-oodle-oodle-oop as everyone else. One would expect the possibility of ring tone selection, to make distinguishing that much easier. The new ring will take some getting used to. Mainly as it's a new sound and I am not yet accustomed to ignoring it when someone else's phone rings. Also I now have a sort of caller ID. I can see which other internal extension is calling anyway. The first out-of-plant call I got showed up as "T1 Line3" or something like that. Oh yes, the LCD has time and date. And naturally the phone time and the computer network time disagree by three minutes...

There is no MUTE button. There is, annoyingly, a PAGE button. I expect to hear even more accidental pages or pages are someone leaving leaving it off hook and not realizing sorts of things. Before it took three buttons to do that. Now a single button allows that to happen. Since 1) I almost never page and 2) the old three button method works (so not every phone had to be switched over...or something) and 3) MUTE is more useful and less dangerous than PAGE, I may look into how to trade the functions. Yep, the phone is fancy enough to allow some button redefinition.

Comments

[frostyw.livejournal.com]

That's about as useful as our phone system displaying "Flexpath / 3001" when we get a call in from most outside lines. I asked the telecoms folks what the "3001" represents; "oh, that's the trunk number it's coming in on." Great. I've got a call coming in on trunk 3001, as if that tells me anything useful.

We sometimes see outside phone numbers on inbound calls; oddly enough, our numbers are blocked outbound.

We have the same time disparity on our phone system. The time source is separately maintained. Some phones show the time constantly; mine requires me to press a TIME / DATE button. In the age where the telecoms group, which sits across the aisle from me, connects to the switch over the LAN, we should have servers and phone switches that consult a central time source.

Secretaries used to have a page feature on their phones, but that's gone now. It was gone before I got here in 1994. There are eight ringers built into my phone model, and the MUTE button is a hardwired feature.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

There is a real improvement. The old phones did not have a REDIAL button. The new ones do. Already put it to good use.

Oh, and everyone now has a code for outgoing long distance so they can be tracked. "This number is not to be given to anyone." Well, a bit of looking at one, and asking to confirm with someone else who looked at theirs, and the code is broken. It's a cheap attempt at obfuscation without any attempt at real randomness. The upshot is anyone can use anyone else's code all too easily. I wonder how long before they realize that (or someone tells them.. or someone Not Liked gets asked questions about calls s/he didn't make...) and change things - or abandon it as "too much work."

[frostyw.livejournal.com]

Our phones are all classified with "classes of service" (in the old switch they were called "classes of restriction"). Each station has a CoS that defines where it can call; for example, my phone has "international" access, but a community phone in the factory can only call local numbers.

Furthermore it defines over which trunk calls are made; this is actually for 9-1-1 service. Two phones with the same call range in two different buildings will have two different CoS so that 911 calls from one building show up as being from THAT building (even if the trunk is physically located in the central facility, it's tagged with the appropriate building name).

As for redial, our switch supports dialing a "#9" to redial on phones where no feature button exists. My station has an "LND" (Last Number Dialed) button.