Ring Group - Single Active Call Allowed

FreePBX Configuration
1

My operators are set up in a ring group with our main DID directed to the ring group. Each department in our store has it’s own ring group with the phones in that department in the ring group. All ring groups are configured with the ringall strategy. The departmental ring groups are configured to transfer calls back to the operators if the call is not answered after 30 seconds.

Our operators have reported that when they transfer a call to a departmental ring group, it behaves as you’d expect - all the phones start ringing. If they transfer another call to the same ring group while they are ringing from the first call, the transferred call immediately bounces back to the operators.

The operator ring group does not behave this way - we regularly get several calls in at the same time and the lines ring on the operator phones regardless of whether there are already other calls active or ringing.

Both ring groups are configured identically in the GUI. The only differences that I can find is that the operator phones have 5 line appearances for their extensions while the departmental phones have 2. The departmental phones also have call waiting disabled as they find it very troublesome when dealing with customers. The operators are more comfortable with the phones and have call waiting enabled.

I logged into mysql and compared the raw tables with the ring groups - they are indeed identical. There is a field called ignore_cw and it is blank. Is call waiting being disabled the source of the problem with the ring groups not permitting more than one call to hit it at the same time?

2

If anyone else finds this thread in the future, there is an option within the brand of the endpoint manager that specifies whether the phone should beep, ring, or remain silent when a second call arrives while one is on the phone with call waiting active; I was unaware of this when the users complained that the CW beeps were eliminating part of what the customers were saying & at that time, turning call waiting off was the simplest / easiest / most effective solution to the problem. Unfortunately, that’s what caused the problem described above.

The solution I came up with was to set this to ring so that the phone will make noise in this situation, but not enough to interfere with the users talking with the customers. Once I turned call waiting back on, the operators were able to transfer multiple calls to the ring group without them immediately being bounced back.