Feeding digits to the phone company to do line forwarding at the CO

[johnathcc]

I'm trying to reconstruct the configuration on a BCM 400 ver 3.7 that replaced an old BCM 400 3.0, which was so old and unpatched we couldn't get a backup off it. I've actually nailed down all but one thing, and it's driving me nuts:

Customer has 8 Centrex trunks. On one set, they have a ringing appearance of their first line and a button right below that labeled "PATCH". Every night their security people pick up the handset, punch the line button, enter *72, and hit the PATCH button, and the result is supposed to be that their first line gets forwarded ***at the CO*** to their 8th line, which is hooked into their radio system.

My question is, what was on the PATCH button? It's not an external speed dial -- I tried that, and it doesn't work. I need some feature that feeds a string of DTMF tones -- the 8th line's number -- into the existing call. What would that be? Or is there some other factor I'm not thinking of?

I have lots of experience with MICS and CICS, not so much with BCMs. Thanks for just reading this!

 

[Boomarang]

Sounds like anexternal speed dial with a hookflash as a "link" and then the 8th trunk for Plexar/Centrex.

Could also be external speed dial with only the digit "#".

Forwarding the line should just be the code: 72# (for AT&T), could be different for your CLEC.

 

[johnathcc]

Actually, I figured it out, thank you. The missing piece was the "9" -- I had programmed the PATCH key with the 7-digit phone number. Then I read the detailed instructions posted in the security dispatch office: "*72-9-xxx-xxxx". I reprogrammed the PATCH key with 9 and the same 7-digit number, and voila! it worked.

Also, I turned off Autohold on the set in question. Not sure if that really made a difference.