His phone number is with the local stete Telco. Because his business need is a higher priority I have two local phone numbers (one with Voip.Ms and one with another provider). This allows that if Voip.ms goes down, he can locally unforward his main number and set call forward to the other provider. That usually workes great. His local telco charges alot and does not offer the services we need from Voip.Ms or the alternate provider. He does need that redundancy though so is willing to leave his main number on the telco. He has multiple Voip phones with buttons and they contain both Voip.Ms and the other provider.
So every once in a while he stops getting calls. I call the main number and it just rings and rings. I think if I wait long enough I will get a reorder, but that is beside the point. The call just never rings the physical phone. If I dial the Voip.ms number (the one that thw call should have been directed to) the system works, the call appears on the phone, etc.
It appears that when this happens, either the local telco has a bad routing table or the receiving phone provider (in this case it is Level-3 Communications) is not sending the proper supervision indicators.
Sometimes the problem just disappears and things start working, but other times I have to call the local telco and get them to try to contact the other provider. As I say, it just involves a forwarded call from the telco provider to another provider. If you call the second provider DID number all works.
I just hate to have to spend all the time with the Telco explaining what is happening and get them to try to contact up the chain to fix a problem you would think they would know about or be able to fix permanently.
My employer has been experiencing similar issues with the connection between the “ILEC” (incumbent local exchange company) that they pay for service and various “CLEC” (competitive local exchange company) companies like Level-3 and Bandwidth. When they track it down it is usually a bad connection between the two companies at the tandem where calls hand off between the two companies. When the link fails calls are blocked between the ILEC and CLEC. We have had failures at least once each month. Sometimes two or three separate failures in a month. Restoration usually takes 24hrs but if it fails on a Friday it could be Sunday or Monday.
(I expect that if you dialed your local telco number from your voip line the call would fail.)
I agree that this is something that the phone companies should be able to fix permanently but we are still seeing occasional outages that the ILEC and CLEC don’t seem interested in setting up routing around the circuit that fails. Usually the cell phone companies have better redundancy but we have had outages where one of the cell providers cannot call the numbers affected.
Unfortunately the business customers end up getting the blame for the failed connection between the ILEC and CLEC. Fortunately (?) in my area all businesses have had outages at different times so callers are becoming more aware that “the phone company” is the problem, not the businesses choice of phone company.
No solution - just the state of the industry where ILECs and CLECs connect.
So the call transfer problem was resolved. For some reason the Telco we used either manually disabled call-forwarding or there is a process that did it for some reason. A call to them, they checked the account and then re-enabled forwarding and it works again.
To address why we don’t just port the number to Voip.Ms is because we have the need to forward to one or the other of our providers. Normally if there was an issue getting to provider A’s number, we would transfer to provider-B’s number. We could not transfer this time because when they did some construction at the site, the Telco wire was dropped through the floor and was inaccessible. In this case (with call transferring disabled at the CO, I could have hooked up their cordless phone to the Telco and let them answer the calls without the Automated Attendant.
We have had issues with the local Telco AND the Cable Company having telephone routing issues, so we prefer to keep the number with the Telco. Also, we normally can forward those calls even if the Internet is down to a number not effected, like a cellphone.