Valcom talk back paging again!

[Oldtimephoneguy]

Good morning. Sorry to ask again but we (and Cisco) are chasing out tails trying to get this paging to work. On a conference call Friday with Cisco I discovered that the person from Cisco knew little if anything about telephony. She was reading from a flow chart and was very rigid in not trying or wanting to understand our requirements. She kept looking (insisting) for "closure" on the FXO port (tip and ring shorted) when in deed we need the circuit to remain open so a talk path can be given to the Valcom unit. She didn't understand that for talk-back paging we need a plain and simple talk path from the router to the Valcom as it's a one-zone unit. Multi-zone units supply dial tone to the caller so a "zone" (1, 2, 3 etc) can dialed into the unit. This scenario would indeed need a closure to seize dial tone from the paging unit. Valcom says this is an everyday VOIP requirement that works with their talk-back unit but they don't know how to program the router to acheive this. In-a-nutshell here's what we desire. User dials "81" and accesses the FXO port 1. To simulate proper connection we should be able to plug an analog phone into port 1 and talk to the Call Manager phone that dialed "81". Cisco cannot understand this and Valcom says it's done all the time. Please help as my head is swollen from beating it against the wall for so long. Thanks to all!

Frank. City of Cape Coral, Florida

 

[senk1s]

are you using station side(FXS) or trunk side(FXO) on the paging equpment

http://www.valcom.com/pdf/pageguidetb.pdf

 

[brianinms]

If you want to plug a phone into port 1 then you need an FXS card, not an fxo card.

 

[whykap]

Oldtimephone guy an FXO port is a "trunk port" so you cannot plug in an analog phone and get dialtone. for that you need an FXS port which would be a "station port".

you seem to confuse FXO with FXS so what does the VALCOM unit require?

 

[TheMitelGuy]

Which Valcom unit do you have??

 

[Oldtimephoneguy]

Thanks for all of the replies! I'll try to address all the replies here.
senk1s = We're using trunk side FXO paging.

brianinms = I only plugged a phone into the FXO card so I could hear the page from the Call Manager. In a scenario like this the phone would simulate a trunk level paging system and I could here the person paging.

whykap/themitelguy = Thanks but I wasn't expecting dial tone. Please see above.The Valcom unit we have here is a V-9941A one zone talk-back unit. It's a trunk level (only) paging system. It cannot accept station level access (ring voltage). It only needs a talk path to it and you make your page. Normally on a key system or PBX it would connect to a page port or C.O. line port.
Thanks again for your help. Hopefully we're getting somewhere.



Frank. City of Cape Coral, Florida

 

[whykap]

This unit requires an external -24V power supply to operate.
Have you plugged in an analog phone on the tip and ring speaker output of the Valcom unit? If it is configured correctly it should be able to talk to the originating phone.

Your analog phone needs to be plugged in the speaker output and not into the FXO port.

If it is not working that way make sure that the paging code accesses the FXO port (verify correct cisco configuration) and also make sure that the Valcom unit it wired correctly.

Other than that it should work,as I have made it work with just about every paging unit out there with no issues.

 

[BuckWeet]

Oldtimephoneguy..

I ran into this issue when I used to install Callmanglers.. The traditional PBX way of using an FXO port doesn't work properly with Cisco's systems as it doesn't have the capability of just opening the port up like you're wanting..

The way that we ended up installing them was to get a paging system that works with a station or FXS port.

There might be multiple wiring binding posts on your valcom that would accept either FXO or FXS capabilities.


BuckWeet