Hello, I have a couple questions regarding the behavior of forwarded calls, and whether or not is possible to alter it.
The system in question is running freepbx15, Asterisk 16.26.1 with Digium D60 and D65 phones all configured through endpoint manager. One of our users has calls set to forward to his cell when out of office, through the “forward calls” option assigned to a softkey through endpoint manager. The call forwarding itself works fine, but when he picks up the call on his cell, the caller ID on some of the calls will read as the original caller’s CID, where some will read as the CID of the PBX.
Is it possible to get it so that forwarded calls will always read as the PBX CID? either through a phone setting or on the PBX itself? Or is that something I would need to contact my service provider about?
Second, if he does not answer the forwarded call, it pulls back to the PBX and puts the caller on voicemail for his PBX extension. Is there a way to make it so that it will go to his cell phone’s voicemail instead? This one is less important, I have voicemail to email set up, but it would be a nice quality of life feature to have that voicemail go directly to his cell.
That’s the opposite of what most people seem to want, but it is becoming more and more the only option. I think the real question is whether you ever want to send something other than the network’s idea of the trunk number down a trunk. If you don’t, it may be as simple as setting from use and disabling other caller ID mechanisms.
I suspect the variations are due to different policies on unverified numbers.
This business exclusively uses call forwarding to send their landlines to their cellphones, and want the CID to show as the business so they know the call is business related when out of office. No need for anything else. Where would I need to go to enforce that?
Nevermind, I think I found it in the trunk settings, Block Foreign CIDs. I would still like to know if it is possible to get the forwarded call to go to the cell phone’s voicemail or not.
Whether it goes to the cell voicemail or not is probably determined by the timeout in FreePBX, that on the cell, and whether the cell is busy or unanswered. One would normally expect it to go to the cell voicemail if allowed more than, typically, 20 seconds.
I’m really an Asterisk person, so I can’t tell you where yo set the relevant timeout, in FreePBX.
Generally cell voicemail systems answer the call and Asterisk cannot distinguish this from a normal answer; trying to do answering machine detection would just confuse the caller.
Again, I seem to remember more people wanting things not to go to a cell voicemail, than wanting it to.
You hit the nail on the head, The timeout on his cellphone was ~30 seconds, default for freepbx is 25. I enabled the findme/followme option for this particular user’s extension, and that allows me to set a ring timeout for just his extension. It looks like there are options here for outbound CID as well, if I needed more granular control for that.
Thank you for your insight, it helped me zero in on the settings I needed instead of floundering around.
Why not just have the follow-me Confirm calls set to yes so the person presses 1 before answering that way they KNOW it’s a business call. Or, if pressing 1 is really that hard, use the CID Name Prefix in the Follow-me setting to say something like “Work” and then the caller ID. They wouldn’t need to press any buttons but would still know it was a WORK call, plus they’d see the caller ID of the person calling.
Your way seems to be creating an opportunity for problems if people start answering work calls when they think it’s a personal call etc. You can do it, but it sounds like a bad idea. I see no advantage in doing it your way. Only disadvantages.