Distinct Ring Pattern from Telco on MICS R1T1

[tcwinont]

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

I don't know if would work. Here is the scenerio:

I have a person running their business within my office. I am planning on having two lines installed for this person patched into my MICS R1T1. He wants it setup so that when the main line is busy, it will roll over to the second line. I've already asked my telco to do this. However, at the same time he wants to use the second line as a fax which I already have an old ATA adaptor for. Now the problem lies in if line 1 is busy, it will automatically roll over to line 2 BUT I wouldn't want the fax to pick up unless it was really a fax and not a rolled over voice call. I know I can get distinct ringing patterns from my telco and would have to get a fax machine that reconizes this. Now because the line is coming into my MICS, would this cancel any distinct ringing patterns from my telco?

Am I making looking at this all too complicatedly? I guess another option would be this, if I'm correct, most of the newer fax machines having a silent monitoring feature on them, at least the HP 5110 and v40 all-in-ones I have used do. What I mean by this is if I place a voice call on one a line that has one of these machines hooked up to it and somebody on the other side picks up, if I press '123' on the dial pad, the machine picks up to receive a fax. Should I go this route?

Any help or comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks you.

 

[trabra]

One option would be to install a line Fax Share device on the 2nd line. Take the line directly from the LEC and install it in the LINE port. You will have 2 or 3 additional ports, depending on the model, that are labelled FAX, TELEPHONE and MODEM. Connect the TELEPHONE to the MICS and the FAX to the fax. The line share immediately answers the call, recognizes CNG/Fax tone, if the CNG is absent, the call routes to the telephone port and if recognized, routes to the fax. You wouldn't need anything like Distinctive ring just hunting from line 1 to line 2. Give out line 1 as the main number and line 2 as the Fax line. You can purchase this product at Best Buys or Office Depot/Office Max for less than $100.00.

On thing though, this is not the BEST solution, it the CHEAP solution. If this is a high volume fax location, bite the bullet and get a dedicated fax line and leave the hunt group alone!

 

[polarbear85]

A similar, somewhat better, nearly as cheap solution:

Instead of the Fax Share device trabra suggested between the telco and MICS and fax, put in a distinctive ring box there, and get distinctive ring from the telco. That will cost him a few bucks a month for the distinctive ring, but it avoids callers hearing that screwy fake ringback from the Fax Share box. The distinctive ring box passes calls through to the MICS or the fax, as appropriate, and the caller never knows it's there.

 

[jerryreeve]

I have used one of the newer fax machines that have the Distinctive ring box built in and then backfeed the normal ring from the fax machine back to the phone room and inputing it into the ICS. Problem with this is that I cannot incorporate this line into a pool since the ICS will try to access the line even though there is no dial tone, had to tell lthe customers that they could use that line only by manually punching the "fax line" button and not dialing 9.

JerryReeve
Communications Systems Int'l
com-sys.com