I have been researching for months for a way to get an incoming call terminating to an IVR to ring for the caller with no success until today. I don’t understand why it works and why there isn’t a much simpler way of making this happen.
I installed the FreePBX distro 3.2 Beta and am religious about keeping the modules current. I have four trunk lines from voip.ms coming into a multi-tenant setup with each trunk going to a seperate operating company through the extension routes module, licensed from Schmoozecom. It works great! The IVR’s allow the caller to get to the respective company and all of the extensions internally can get to the other companies extensions, but any extension dialing out can only use their own DID trunk and CID.
My challenge was that the caller never heard a ringtone, the IVR would just answer. I have posted several times and no one ever hit upon an answer or where to research further. Usually the posts just went unanswered.
I finally solved the problem by creating a receptionist extension and then set the “incoming route” destination to that extension. Still wouldn’t ring. I then created a “follow me” configuration for the receptionist. I set the initial ring time to 9 seconds and then the ringtime for each “follow me” member (only one, but it had to be different than the Receptionist extension) to 1 second so two ringtones would be generated. I then set the “destination if no answer” to the IVR. Now when the trunk is dialed the phone RINGS and is answered by the IVR to allow the caller to get to where they need to go.
This is an extremely convoluted way to accomplish simple ringtone generation, but it works. I’m hoping the forum members here can explain why this works and refine this approach for me or generate a module to do this seemingly simple task, that required so many configurations. I did submit a trouble ticket with voip.ms and their response was “a ringtone is never generated to an IVR”…?
In any case I hope this helps others with incoming call ringtone problems with FreePBX.
All the best!