I migrated ~80 Cisco 7960 phones to Polycom VVX410s several months ago. Overall, our people really like them (after the learning process) and they eliminated a very perplexing bug that the Cisco phones were experiencing since our Meraki edge device was updated, so win-win. Recently, I’ve been getting complaints from our operator group - 3 phones in a ring group that’s the destination for our main number. Each is configured with a 40-line expansion module to provide BLF lights / keys for commonly used extensions. Each has it’s own extension with 5 lines and the ring group is configured to ring them all simultaneously.
They have been able to give me few details about them other than a description of what happened, despite my telling them I need date / time / caller id / description of what happened multiple times in the past. The issues seem to be recurring VERY infrequently, so much so that I wonder if they just felt like complaining about something that day. Here are the symptoms they’ve reported & my thoughts on each.
- Dropped transfers to ring group.
Symptoms - Two different operator phones experienced this yesterday, the person who mans the third wasn’t in at the time. A customer called in and the operator hits the transfer softkey and the BLF for the department’s ring group. All the phones are configured for blind transfer. They could see the buttons for the phones in that department’s ring group light up for about one second, then go dark again. The people in that department reported that the phone would ring once and then disconnect before they had time to answer. The customer called back, saying he was disconnected. This happened 4 times in rapid succession. The fifth time he called, the operator transferred him in the same manner directly to one of the phones in the department’s ring group and it completed fine. The problem fixed itself after a few minutes - before I had a chance to investigate as it happened while I was driving to work. It was reported that this was happening with all of our departmental ring groups, though they could only provide me with call examples for the one.
Analysis - The fact that the call dropped before the people in the destination ring group could even try to answer eliminates something like a dirty hangup switch on the phone. (This would happen not infrequently with the Cisco phones - pick up the phone and it would go off hook-on hook-off hook in under a second, essentially answering the call & hanging up immediately.) It happened with two different operator phones, so it’s not likely something with the hardware on their side. The transfer succeeded going to a direct extension, so it’s not going to be the process they use to transfer. Thankfully, the problem fixed itself so it’s not a HUGE deal, but I would like to figure out a cause and do something to make sure it does not happen again. This is the only one of these issues I have call details about. I have the logs on the server & have found the call examples, but each call attempt is ~60 pages (if I were to print it) and I honestly do not know what I’m looking for.
- Calls cannot be picked up
Symptoms - One of our operators was on lunch and one was on the phone trying to calm down an irate customer. The second operator (who just started a couple weeks ago) was on the phone with another customer when two more calls came in. The second operator put her call on hold and pressed one of the line buttons on her phone that was flashing / ringing. Nothing happened. She could not pick up either call. The one with the irate customer put him on hold and then she was able to pick up both new calls by pressing the ringing line key on her phone, the same as the second operator was doing, and get them to the departments they wanted to go to, before going back to the irate customer. The second operator was able to use her phone normally after these two calls were cleared.
Analysis - This screams like something on the phone level to me. I upgraded the firmware on all of the phones to the latest available - 5.9.8.5760 - before I deployed them. The only thing I can think of to try to mitigate the issue is to script rebooting the operator phones each morning an hour before we open, but this really isn’t a solution.
- One call to rule them all, one call to find them, one call to ring them all, and on the phone fill them…
Symptoms - This has reportedly happened ‘a couple of times’ over the last 4-6 months. A call will come in to the operators and instead of showing up as one ringing line like normal, it will show as ringing on all five lines as if someone from that number had called us 5 times simultaneously. When one of the flashing calls was picked up, all the incoming calls from the same number on the other lines immediately stopped ringing. All three operator phones behaved the same way for these calls.
Analysis - Also feels like a local phone issue for me rather than on the PBX, but the fact that it happened on all 3 phones tends to refute that assumption. It happens so infrequently and with such a low level of detail that it’s nearly impossible to troubleshoot. We have recevied ‘telemarketer bombs’ in the past where we would be called multiple times from the same number at nearly the same time, but this was a legitimate caller and not a telemarketer. Again, the only possible thing I can think of doing is to script a phone reboot & asterisk reload shortly before we open & cross my fingers. Really hate doing this type of thing though.
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I’d appreciate any input anyone has about these. #1 is the only one that feels like it’s absolutely PBX related, but I honestly don’t know at this point… that’s going more on gut feeling more than objective observation. It fixed itself in a matter of minutes, so 
Scripting a phone reboot is trivially simple with the script I wrote , but I honestly do not know if this will have any impact at all on such transient problems.