One extension seems to ring first in a ring group

[dg]

Howdy, folks,

We're running a 3300 setup with NuPoint and 5330e and 5340e phones. We work in a retail environment, so being the first one to answer a phone is fairly important to the sales folks. We have three extensions in a particular ring group, and apparently they did some testing over the weekend and discovered one of the three seems to always ring first (thus giving a slight advantage to that sales guy.) Everybody has the same ring cadence and pitch, so there's no timing variation there. I can't imagine the difference is more than a second. I assume the ring-response timing is just unique to each particular phone and can't be changed, right?

Can anybody think of a good explanation of why this would be happening, or even better, how to solve it? It's more of a curiosity than anything.

TIA,
-dg

[ralph]

I've seen two occasions where I've seen what I would call a "cascading" ring.
Once was caused by a secondary dialtone being enable for the leading ARS digit for interpbx routing.  Cluster Element ID Digits.
The second time was caused by a network issue where packets were being delayed across the WAN.  It was only the control packets and not RTP.

How many systems are in your cluster?
What software rev are you at?
What type of phones are you using?
Are they run across a WAN?


Ralph

[dg]

Hi Ralph.
Well, there are 6 controllers in the cluster, but all the phones in all locations are registered to one controller (over metro-e).

The phones in question are all 5330e's, and they're in the same physical building as the primary controller that everybody's registered to. All three are connected directly to the controller via a StreamLine PoE, then right to the same switch as the controller itself, and the PRI is also in this building, so there's no WAN or metro-e traversal to speak of. In fact, they're within about ten feet of each other and all programmed effectively the same. (Same tenant, same zone, etc.) I did, however, just notice that the one ringing first has a manual zone assignment whereas the others are default, but they're still in the same zone regardless, since the default is zone 1. Curious if that might actually have something to do with it...

The release level is 6.0 SP3, active software load is 12.0.3.16.

The calls in question are either coming into the DID for that ring group, or being transferred to it from the receptionist (who is also in the same building.)

Thanks,
-dg

I've seen two occasions where I've seen what I would call a "cascading" ring.
Once was caused by a secondary dialtone being enable for the leading ARS digit for interpbx routing.  Cluster Element ID Digits.
The second time was caused by a network issue where packets were being delayed across the WAN.  It was only the control packets and not RTP.

How many systems are in your cluster?
What software rev are you at?
What type of phones are you using?
Are they run across a WAN?


Ralph

[ralph]

That software rev has the fix for the secondary dial tone issue.
I would be curious if the zones had anything to do with that.   Can you make a change and test?

I'd also be curious if the DSCP and L2 Priority values could be modified and tested.
The 2nd time I saw it was when the voice signalling packets were delays.
We had to do a wireshare trace at both the phone and controller to see it but it did show that there was a significant delay between when the packets were sent and when they were received.
I'd like to see a test where the voice signalling DSCP and L2 priority was set to match it's Voice Media values.  Pretty simple test.  It's changed in the LAN Policy form.

Ralph

[dg]

Hi gang,
Just wanted to follow up on this. I set the one odd phone to use a default zone instead of manual, like the other two, and apparently that has corrected the issue. Now the one doesn't exhibit the "advantage" it once had over the other two. Go figure. Perhaps there's just enough of a delay while the system figures out which zone the 'default' is that it always rang the manually set one first.
Thanks,
-Dg