Quote from: cvc1968 on October 08, 2012, 08:10:37 AM
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Am I reading that correctly?
And if that is the case, do you then just turn off the ringer on the telephone(s) you have plugged into the OBI to avoid dual ringing sounds?
The other possibility for me, if the OBI itself rings, is that I wouldn't really even need a telephone plugged into it. Rather, the sound of the OBI ringing through the house would be enough to let me and/or my wife know that there was a call which we could then answer on our respective iPhones.
I got slightly mixed up on your land-line question, but reread and see that you were asking about all three possible Obi models.
So to restate what jimates said, the Obi models do not have on-board "ringers" inside them. The devices work like the dial tone supplied by a local phone company, a certain signal on the phone line makes your plugged in phone(s) ring.
You're asking about two or three different related things, and they can all be made to work together: You can plug a ringer only into an Obi phone port (and as you say have the GV call also forwarded to your mobile phone). Also, there are phones that "ring differently" based on the caller ID the phone receives, meaning the ringer on-board the phone has a different pattern (cadence) based on the caller ID. It makes sense that someone somewhere will also sell a ringer-only that does this same thing.
The ring pattern the Obi sends to the phone ports -- same as what would be supplied by a local phone company -- is also configurable. Here is the default from an Obi202: 60;(2+4), this means for up to 60 seconds, ring for 2 seconds, and be silent for 4 seconds, then repeat.
You can change and configure up to ten of these settings per phone port, for a total of 20 different patterns. The one gotcha here is if you make up your own pattern, it must comply with/allow for how the Caller ID signal is sent from the phone port to the phone, generically stated as between the first and second ring. So you could not for example have a ring of six seconds, and a silence of two seconds. Well, you could but the Caller ID would not be send out successfully on this ring pattern, based on some experimenting I've done.