I have an odd problem that was happening, then wasn’t happening, now happening again with FreePBX and Polycom VVX500 phones. I’ll do my best to describe it. A new call comes in to a ring group that has let’s say three extensions. After about two or three rings, instead of the phone just showing the new call, it lists multiple calls - basically it lists the other ringing extensions as if they are also calls saying “Remote User: Name EXT” and then “To: sip:XXX@server” and then “From:”
If you scroll all the way down that list on the screen, you can answer the original call at the bottom, but if you just pick up the phone, it tries to answer the fake extension ringing calls first. Any ideas?
From doing some testing, here’s a little extra information. Seems to only be an issue for extensions that are subscribed via BLF keys on the Polycom. On a ring group with two extensions - A and B, A is subscribed to B but not the other way around. On phone A, after three rings, I see the incoming ringing call but also the notification that B is ringing. On phone B, after three rings, I only see the incoming call.
If that’s the case, I doubt it’s just a problem with Polycom phones. It’s not an unexpected problem (you’re subscribed to his phone, and it is ringing), but still… I can’t think of a way to avoid it unless you remove the BLF for the rest of the ring group members or simply tell your people “This is the way it is - don’t press those buttons - they’re ringing.”
So, if extension A is subscribed to extension B with a BLF, and a call hits the ring group, both phones ring and A displays the original call and the call that is hitting B?
That’s expected behavior if phone A’s config is set to display caller ID of calls coming to extensions monitored as BLFs. And you’d have to disable that to stop it from happening. Phone A isn’t aware that the call it is receiving and the call that phone B are receiving are the same call. If you do disable it, you won’t see who is calling your BLFs, but you will see that they are ringing. That is how we have it configured, but that doesn’t matter in our situation as we don’t pickup calls for other extensions.
Thanks - I upgraded the VVX 500’s from ~4.0.1 to 5.5.x firmware and at least for now that seems to have fixed the problem. However, even with the prior firmware and no settings changed, it wasn’t always doing this. We have our ring time set to 25 seconds. For the first 3 rings, everyone sees the top image. Then Polycom phones seem to default after 3 rings to a screen that shows all ringing calls - the second image shows how it displays all the ringing extensions. You’d have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see the actual incoming call that was previously on the screen. When you go to a phone that isn’t BLF subscribed to any of the other people in the ring group, you still switch to this view, you just see the one incoming call.
Thanks for the tip on the features.cfg file - I will monitor that if the behavior reappears. We don’t do call pickup either, so shouldn’t be a problem. Ideally though the phone would be smart enough to realize that a ring group is going on, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Wasn’t a problem when I used Snom’s that only had a 1 line display.
