[VoIP] Ernest Telecomm 7D-3 Payphone

[Duncan Smith]

On Sat, Aug 25, 2007 at 08:17:48PM -0700, Donald Froula wrote:
> It gives a phony dial tone. When I finish dialing and it is asking
> for money, I can faintly hear it quickly redial the first 3 numbers
> of what I dialed, then slowly dial the remainder of the number while
> it waits for coins. Depositing the correct coins makes it quickly
> finish dialing. I guess that's to hold the line against an incoming
> call.

That's fairly normal for COCOT-type payphones.  I've always thought it
is so that the call will complete quickly after depositing the final
coin.  Compare to a Nortel Millennium--one of those monsters has to
place a call to some sort of dispatch before calling anything out-of-
area!

> Throwing the program switch makes it go off hook and go into a mode
> where one can dial with the receiver on or off hook. Dialing * or #
> plus two digits disables the keypad for a second, but no beeps,
> voice, or feedback of any kind.

You can access limited settings (when in normal mode) by dialling
*#6X, where X is a digit.  *#61, for example, will make the phone tell
you what it thinks its number is.  *#68 will make it call home; doing
this on a wild payphone can make it irredeemably busy for minutes at a
time.

Continuing on this tangent, I've noticed that I can put my home line
out of service for several minutes by repeatedly taking the line
off-hook and hanging up again.  I haven't counted, but it seems to
take 20 to 30 cycles.  I don't get dialtone; I haven't tried calling
in after doing this.  (I'm homed off a Qwest 5ESS, if that makes a
difference.)

-- 
Duncan Smith  --------\    http://students.washington.edu/f/    /---
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