If I remember correctly, the original discussion on this involved some
old standard WeCo phones that were not ringing well on ATAs.
I had that problem, and solved it by opening up all my phones (now
connected to ATAs rather than to the traditional phone net) and moving
the bell tension spring from the strong to the weak position.
In the strong position, the bell requires a higher voltage to ring
properly. In the weak position, on a long loop you end up with bell
tinkle when other extensions go off an on-hook and during rotary
dialing. Bell tinkle is not a problem when connected to the short
loop inside your single dwelling only. There's no real need to up the
voltage on the ATA if you just change the bell tension.
In re the recent discussion about post dial delay on Vonage: They are
not currently making "#" a terminator for timing on calls not
beginning with "011", so it does no good. You will have a timeout on
any call that does not begin with "1" since they are allowing variable
length dialling. For example, you can call a Vonage (only a Vonage)
customer with a UK number by dialling just 44 nn nnnn nnnn. There are
currently no ambiguities with a U.S. 44X NXX XXXX number, and the
decision on how to process the call is based on the length.
Note that this ONLY works for actual Vonage customers with UK numbers,
and not for other numbers in the UK. These calls are all Vonage
in-network calls, and are free for Vonage customers, as well as if
dialled from FWD using their peering code **243 44 nn nnnn nnnn. At
the moment this only applies to Vonage UK "Virtual Numbers" pointing
to US Vonage customers, but I fully expect (could turn out to be
wrong) for it to work the same way for real Vonage UK customers later
this year.
/john
John R. Covert (nospamtd@covert.org)