OBi202 conference wih different providers?
HHinFlorida:
Well, to clarify, I was thinking three way. Or last least thinking in terms of three endpoints. Four (or even five??!) endpoints is an interesting idea though, if someone wants to try it (not me).
But the point of using two separate physical phones is that the people being called on the other end are not terribly sophisticated (to put it mildly) and there are two potential problems:
1. The person put on hold might think that the call is lost and hang up, despite pleas not to do so.
2. It isn't clear at the time of trying to set up the conference whether either or both called people will actually be available. So the idea was for me to call one and have a conversation, my partner to call the other and have a conversation, and if that is all going well then to propose a conference. Four people, yes, but two of them local to the OBi202 itself.
I suppose it is the difference between something that works and something that is comfortable for non-techies to use. I always hate the idea of "flash hook" in that there is no bright line between flash-hook and hang-up except timing. Things that depend on human timing are always a bit trickier than things which don't depend on timing. I suspect we have all suffered meta-stability problems in our work (just a guess, don't flame!).
Thank you to the person who suggested using a conferencing two-line telephone. That may very well be the best approach in the end.
So thank everyone, all of the comments were valuable to me. All of them.
restamp:
I have an OBi202 in service here. Robert's proposal to use barge-in to establish a 4-way call was intriguing to me although I never had the time to get three additional friends together to try it in real-life to see if it would work. However, I had to establish a 4-way call just a few moments ago, so I finally had the chance to put his proposal to the test. (One attempt, so take it with a grain of salt.)
I established a conventional 3-way call with two of the other parties on PH1, then called the third party on PH2,
flashed PH2 and hit '#'. The result... Unfortunately, PH2 rang busy in this barge-in attempt. So, based on this one attempt, and presuming I didn't make any stupid mistakes in the process, barge-in under these conditions does not appear to work.
(I still needed to chat with these 3 other people, preferably together, so when this didn't work, I set the phones connected to PH1 and PH2 side-by-side on the desk and hit the speaker-phone button on both. You know, that low-tech solution didn't work out half badly: Everyone said they could hear everyone else just fine. Go figure.)
(After I concluded the 4-way call, I did one further experiment: I called my mobile on PH2, flashed, and hit '#'.
That worked: I was able to transfer the call to PH1 while PH1 was on-hook. However, an attempt to transfer the call back to PH2 from PH1, while PH2 was off-hook, failed. Thus, I suspect the OBi doesn't allow barge-in to an off-hook line while you already have a call on hold. YMMV)
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