Why would I get voicemail when call forward always is set?

General Help
1

Using ARI I have enabled forwarding on an extension to an external cell phone that has its own voicemail… why would incoming calls ever get sent to asterisk voicemail?

I used the ‘Call Routing/Call Forwarding’ option from the ARI (00.10.02) Settings menu. Most calls do route correctly but others go to voicemail on asterisk. Odd…

2

The FreePBX CF option is still controlled by the ring time setting of an extension. This means if the external phone does not answer the call within that time, the dial attempt will time out and control will return to the system. Some people prefer this mode, others not.

When I don’t want this behavior, I do the following. First, set the ring time for the extension high (1 minutes). Next, set the telephone’s settings to forward to voicemail on no-answer after a reasonable amount of time (20 seconds or so). Now if the phone is forwarded (whether FreePBX CF or the phone’s CF), it will ring the far end for a long time. But when not forwarded, the phone itself will redirect to the user’s voicemail after a much shorter time.

Philippe Lindheimer - FreePBX Project Lead
http//freepbx.org - IRC #freepbx

3

Thank you. I clearly misunderstood the nature of how CF was working. I was pictureing a switch, not a timer. Is 60s the max? I know its the max you can set through FreePBX interface but if I set it manually?

[edit: you aren’t referring to AMPUSER/grptime are you? Your talking about RINGTIMER from extenensions_additional, yea? the one that gets passed to dialparties.agi? ]

4

I’m referring to the ringtimer that can be set in a couple of places. The system default is set on the General screen (and the only place for pre-2.3 versions) and the per-extension timer can be set individually with each extension on their respective pages.

On the general screen, you can put in any time. On the per-extension screens, it is a select box ranging to 120 seconds. I suggested 60 seconds above because as a general rule, I don’t think most people would wait even that long before giving up unless they knew it may take a while for you to answer or they were played a message informing them it would take a while. But you can put what ever number you would like.

Philippe Lindheimer - FreePBX Project Lead
http//freepbx.org - IRC #freepbx

5

K. Followup question. If you set CF to an external number and that number is busy… what is the behavior? I think its still dropping to VM which isn’t what I want. I’d like it to (if its busy) send some busy signal to the caller and then hangup.