atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Telephony Discussion Phone & VoIP Systems NEC Telephones & Systems Aspire S CO trunk, IntraMail VRU no longer "hears" touch tones!

I have the latest 7.32 firmware installed. 90-17 reports the COIU version is 01.02, I cannot find any updates for these cards, so I assume it has not been updated.
My Aspire-S is setup for 4 CO trunks. We use IntraMail to answer the phones. Users enter the extension they want. But suddenly, IntraMail does not hear the tones. It ignores them, frustrating my callers. If I put an extension phone in place of my Aspire S, I hear the tones just fine. Loud and clear. Is it possible somehow the card got toasted? My provider hooks me to 4 analog trunks off a PRI. About the time he switched from a Copper PRI to Fiber, the problem occurred. I cannot fathom the link between the two... If anyone has a suggestion, let me know. I may have to try to get SIP trunks configured instead, which will be a very big headache... TIA for any insight!

You found the problem yourself. Provider is not doing something to BellCore standards with regards to DTMF. I would think they have ways of adjusting this to make it work properly. Simple test simply hook a fax line (if its POTS)to the trunk port and see if it continues.

You may have to adjust the transmit gain and receive gain in the Line configuration, if the phone co. doesn't fix it on their end

The frustrating thing is that an answering machine plugged in instead processes the tones just fine... So they are not that broken that nothing can use them. I already tried adjusting the gains, much lower, much higher, in 10db increments in program 14-01, and it did not resolve the problem. Thanks for the suggestion. There really doesn't seem to be much else to adjust on my end...

Does anyone have good experience with SIP trunks? I can do it inside my network, with no authentication. My VoiPU with Daughter board has firmware v4.05. Should SIP trunk work fine at that version, or do you think I need to upgrade that to 4.9 first? I'd have to pull one of my COIU cards, as there are two and they take all 8 trunks (we used to have 6, but we now have just 4). If I pull one, then the VoiPU can get 4 trunks, leaving me with 4 ports for my IP phones. If I use SIP trunks, it should resolve any DTMF issues, but I don't know what new issues I'll be creating. Maybe I should start a new thread regarding SIP trunks...

One more question: Would this be an issue with the IntraMail program? Is that what needs to "hear" the tones? Is that firmware updated with the "main" firmware? I'm at 7.36 for that already...
Thanks.

In this case your DTMF issues has nothing to do with firmware, as you stated the problem started after the provider made changes.

With DTMF comparing a answering machine to the Aspire is comparing apples to oranges, the Aspire CPU is working at a lot faster pace.

As for the SIP trunks, has NEC certified the provider, if they have you will be able to get their documents which will list software version needed along with programming notes.

I will tell you that I had an Aspire S do that in the same scenario about a year ago. We had Intramail answer the calls, and suddenly it just quit recognizing the DTMF tones - which indeed were there.

I replaced the Intramail and daughter board for it - no improvement. Ended up being something on the Aspire main board itself - and the most cost effective thing was to just replace the whole KSU..........

Hope this helps - I fought the thing for a loooooooong time....

That does not sound encouraging
However, you probably did not have SIP trunks? I'm thinking the IntraMail actually works fine, because my IP extension phones work fine with IntraMail. Since SIP sends DTMF signals out of band, I'm thinking that even if the signal processing on the motherboard is shot, that may fix it. I happen to have the system installed somewhere that can provide my trunks either way, so I'll probably give it a shot. Since supporting my phone system is not my main responsibility, I may have to wait until next week to try it. Meanwhile, I'm sending callers directly to a monitored Voicemail box, and simply returning the calls as necessary. It'll do for the short term...