Cordless phone not ringing on incoming calls on PAP2T

Posted in Asides | 2 comments

This is a quick post to potentially help others out that may experience issues with their cordless phone not ringing on incoming calls using a PAP2T Internet phone adapter with 2 ports for VoIP (Voice-over-IP) calls.

Here’s the skinny on the issue: I am running a PBX using PBX In a Flash. I have a PAP2T connected to the network so we can use normal phones to answer and make phone calls. I recently purchased a VTech CS6219 Expandable Cordless Phone System and a Vtech CS6209 extension handset. The problem was that when I called into the system, the cordless phones would not ring on incoming calls, but they would light up and display the caller ID when the call came in. You could also answer the call. So, for all intents and purposes, everything worked except that they would not ring on incoming calls.

I plugged in a normal corded phone into the PAP2T and that phone rang on the incoming call. So there was an issue that needed to be resolved with the PAP2T to make the cordless phone ring on incoming calls. After about an hour a half of searching online, I found a suggestion for cordless phones and the PAP2T on the Voxilla forums:

Make sure you have these settings correct for the cordless phone to ring.

Under Ring and Call Waiting Tone Spec
Ring Waveform: Trapezoidal
Ring Voltage: 90
Ring Frequency: 20

Also have a look at this thread:
http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic6488-0.html

I set my system up as recommended. And yes, the cordless phones did start to ring, but the ring was “choppy,” or “broken up.” But it worked. So being one that seems to have no care if things blow up, I started to toy around with the Ring Frequency setting. I started to put lower numbers in than the 20 that was recommended (the reason for this is that the original setting was 25, and the suggestion was lower, so I thought that lower yet may work). That didn’t seem to work. So I put the number back up to the original setting of 25 and the ring got better. I bumped the number up to 30 and the phones rang fine.

So for my setup with the VTech cordless phones and the PAP2T, the settings that I had to use to go from the cordless phone not ringing on incoming calls on the PAP2T to having them ring are:

Under the Regional link (in the advanced settings) in the Ring and Call Waiting Tone Spec area

Ring Waveform: Trapezoidal
Ring Voltage: 90
Ring Frequency: 30


I hope that this may be of help to others that have a similar setup with a cordless phone that does not ring on incoming calls using the PAP2T.