Staff complaining they can't dial fast enough

We have migrated to FreePBX 12.0.50.1 and have been activly keeping up with the module updates. In the last few weeks i’ve gotten more and more people complaining (the ones complaining are using Cisco 7960’s) that when they hit dial to get dial tone then can’t dial fast enough to get entire number in. I tested it and it seams like its about 5 seconds and i believe it used to be about 10 seconds. The rest of the office doesn’t have issues as they have been upgraded to Grandstreams and Yealinks that allow dialing before hitting the outbound dial tone. Any ideas? I am only smart enough to have figured out how to set all this up and getting it working but mostly using the GUI and only using command prompts when the GUI can’t do what i need.

We have PRI connection and I am not sure if this would be a phone setting or a dahdi or something else. Any help would be appreciated.

How are the phones provisioned

We use EndPoint Manager to provision the phones that are having issues. Some i just provision on the phone itself but those Cisco’s we do through EndPoint Manager

Regardless - when you hit “dial”, the phone dials the number that you just entered. You just have the order wrong - dial the number, then hit dial. It’s like a cell phone.

Dave, thanks for posting, your are right in that all the other phones work that way, except the Cisco 7960’s unfortunately. I will be replacing them but only doing in stages for budget reasons.

Most Cisco’s have a dialplan pulled from the TFTP server. Check the timings in it, you may need to increase the time. I do not believe this is a “FreePBX” issue as such, but the endpoint manager has ended up wiping out my Cisco settings time and time again.

It should look like this DIALPLAN.XML

The Timeout=“5” Should be increased to 10 in your case, if you do not have a dialplan.xml in your tftp folder, copy, edit and build on the one below.

<DIALTEMPLATE>
<TEMPLATE MATCH="#..." Timeout="5" User="Phone" /><!-- Hash, plus three digits, Wait 1 second, then dial. >
<TEMPLATE MATCH="*" Timeout="5" User="Phone" /><!-- Anything else. -->
</DIALTEMPLATE>

cool, I will have to brush up on connecting via putty to figure out how to alter or add that file. If anyone has any basics on commands that will get me to the file that would be great if not will figure it out eventually.

Thanks a lot for the advice on dialplan.xml.

If you are not that great with command line, like myself. You can download a free windows program called WinSCP.

You can set it up to connect using the SFTP protocol and you can browse to the TFTP server folder.

From the Root folder, you will notice a folder called tftpboot. Inside tftpboot you should, if configured correctly, you should have your ringtones for your phones, the cisco loads, config files created by endpoint manager and you should see dialplan.xml. If dialplan.xml does not exist, create it with the following permissions (0755) Group = Asterisk, Owner = Asterisk and insert this information into the ringplan.xml

<DIALTEMPLATE>
<TEMPLATE MATCH="*" Timeout="5"/> <!-- Anything else -->
<TEMPLATE MATCH="0" Timeout="1" User="Phone"/>
<!--  Local operator -->
<TEMPLATE MATCH="011*" Timeout="6" User="Phone"/>
<!--  International calls -->
<TEMPLATE MATCH="9,0" Timeout="8" User="Phone"/>
<!--  PSTN Operator -->
<TEMPLATE MATCH="911" Timeout="0" User="Phone" Route="Emergency" Rewrite="911"/>
<TEMPLATE MATCH="911" Timeout="0" User="Phone"/>
<!--  Service numbers  -->
<TEMPLATE MATCH="9,1.........." Timeout="0" User="Phone"/>
<!--  Long Distance  -->
<TEMPLATE MATCH="9,......." Timeout="0" User="Phone"/>
<!--  Local numbers  -->
<TEMPLATE MATCH="304,......." Timeout="2" User="Phone"/>
<!--  Corporate Dial plan -->
<TEMPLATE MATCH="2..." Timeout="0" User="Phone"/>
<!--  Corporate Dial plan -->
<TEMPLATE MATCH="3..." Timeout="0" User="Phone"/>
<!--  Corporate Dial plan -->
<TEMPLATE MATCH="*" Timeout="5"/>
<!--  Anything else  -->
</DIALTEMPLATE>

Where you see the 304, enter in your local area code.

Dial plans are fairly simple to change around and add information too, what it does with the Cisco phones it give it an idea on how to handle certain strings entered into the phone. The timeouts do exactly that, if it does not see you complete the amount of digits defined, it will timeout and dial anyway.

I don’t really think you need to go anymore than 5 seconds on a time out, or it seems like forever before the phone will make the call. 5 seconds is probably plenty long enough.

I may have been wrong in saying that OSS endpoint manager messes with the config files, but I do know you have to have the dialplan.xml in place for most, if not all Cisco phones.

Take some time and read up on Cisco Dial Plans, it will explain a lot to you, more than I can explain. I can give you some basics, but that is about it.

<TEMPLATE MATCH="*" Timeout="5"/> <!-- Anything else --> 

As it says, this will match any phone number, any dialled area code, any length.

<TEMPLATE MATCH="304,......." Timeout="2" User="Phone"/> 

I use this for local phone numbers, 304 is the area code followed by a comma 304, the dots behind the comma 304,… indicates the amount of numbers behind the area code 304,3435555 which will timeout in 2 seconds after being dialed.

You will need dial plans for 911, extensions and so forth.

<TEMPLATE MATCH="911" Timeout="0" User="Phone" Route="Emergency" Rewrite="911"/>

Simple 911 dial plan.

<TEMPLATE MATCH="3..." Timeout="0" User="Phone"/>

Simple extension dial plan.

Hope this was of some help to you… I am sure there is many people around here that can show you a better format than I. Please do research and look around for them, it will make it easier on you.

Ohh, once you have the dial plan in place, you will need to reboot your phones, provided you have them looking at your tftp server, they will request the files and pull them. Rebooting Cisco 7960 press * 6 and the settings button at the same time.

Can’t tell you how appreciative I am of that answer thank you. That worked perfectly for me, it was set at 2 seconds, and I moved it to 5 and everyone is happy with that.

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Ripping my hair out. Where is the data for the dialplan.xml file coming from? I am able to edit the phone-specific dialplan-[mac].xml files for my 7941 phones using endpoint manager’s basefile edit. However, I can’t seem to be able to find where the dialplan.xml data is coming from for my 7940 phones. If I edit the file manually (to increase the timeout) it gets overwritten the moment I update an extension. The basefile edit for the 7940 has no where to edit dialplan.xml entries. I’ve even snooped in the mysql database to see if there’s something in there I can edit, but noting seems to be working.

Any assistance in finding out where to edit the data for dialplan.xml would be greatly appreciated!!!