I'm considering the idea of using OBi110 to act as a "ringdown" or hotline circuit for a door phone, such as one of these:
Viking Electronics E-20B Door BoxBogen ADP-1 Door PhoneThese door phones contain the same electronics as a regular analog speaker phone, have no dial-pad (or dialing circuitry), and a call button that takes the phone off hook for a fixed period of time (adjustable from 15 seconds to several minutes).
The way this normally works is that when the phone goes off hook, a ringdown device will automatically dial a designated number. Typically this is done with some specialized hardware made for use with door phones, or a specially programmed PBX port. The stand-alone analog hardware to do this runs $80 ~ $100.
Using an ATA for this purpose is potentially far more flexible, as you can route the calls from the door phone to either the onsite house phone or to a remote location, and you give the door phone a dedicated number, without the expense of a dedicated analog line, so you can call in to it from a remote location.
Some searching of the forums did turn up a reference to "hotline" and I found this brief mention in the
Administration Guide. In the "Digit Map Rules and Elements" section, on page 118 and 119:
<:1234> – Matches an empty phone number and replaces with 1234. This is the syntax for a hotline to 1234
<S0:1234> – Equivalent to the last example
<:#> – Hotline to the number #
<S0:#> – Equivalent to the last example
<S4:1234> – Call 1234 if no digits entered for 4s. This is the syntax of a warm line.
Apparently <> designates a pattern substitution. The part before the : is the pattern, and an empty pattern matches anything. Looks like you can also use an S followed by a number of seconds, which causes that pattern to be applied after that number of seconds has passed. The portion after the : are the digits to replace the matched pattern.
I don't have an OBi110 yet to try this out myself, so I asked a friend to give it a spin. He configured his OBi110 to use Callcentric as the primary provider. Test dialed my Callcentric number successfully. Then he went into the OBi110 web UI and navigated to Management -> Physical Interfaces -> PHONE Port, then replaced the contents of DigitMap with <:1234> where 1234 was my Callcentric number as previously test dialed.
He rebooted the OBi110, took his phone off hook, got a dial tone briefly, then an error tone (fast busy). My line didn't ring.
Anyone know what was wrong with our setup?
-Tom