atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Phone line dials 911

I have had many shorts in lines... never once has it dialed 911.

I never would have believed it either until it happened to me TWICE.

At my own house, had a line that was out of service due to an intermittent short somewhere outside for several days. Usual story with Verizon, "we'll get to it". I never pressed them because I have other lines. The resistance of the short varied, sometimes the line would go off hook for extended periods (pick up the line and you will hear the "please hang up and try your call again" message and alert tone), other times there was no battery at all.

And no, I don't even have an alarm.

Well, one night at about 1AM the doorbell rings and there are two cops standing there, couple more are walking around the outside with flashlights. "What's the problem, someone called 911" they said. Must be a mistake I said, as they looked at me like I was beating my wife or something.

Couple of days later exactly the same thing happens at about 4AM. This time I questioned THEM as to what number the call came from. It was the line that was out of service! I brought them in and picked up that line and asked them to make a call on it. I told them that that line has been out of service for several days and nobody could have made a call on it. There are three others that work right there in front of you if anybody needed to do so.

So, what is the probability of an intermittent short on the line producing a 9-1-1 sequence with the right timing? Obviously quite high.

-Hal

I'm going to invite Comdial Guy to this, If my memory serves me correct he had something to do with the 911 systems.
invitation sent.

I would assume that not all COs would be set up to default to 911 on unidentifed dialing. I don't doubt it but we've not seen it here. You learn something new every day. Good post.

I had the same thing as Hal

home phone had been out for two days, 1:00 am cops banging on the door I open their shing the flashlights in my face someone called 911 no I a say phones out nobody called 911

is your wife home ?

yes shes still asleep

we need to talk to her

they where really aholoes about it threatning action for false report evan after I had thme come in and pick up the DEAD phone.

same thing was discussed recently on another non telco board .

so yes a short can trigger it

(mine was GTE )

Here's a thought. What if the short only had to get out a 9 in the middle of a lot of other trash?
I don't know if this is still an issue, but in earlier days of 911, the digits 911 could trigger a call to emergency even if they were buried inside 4 other digits. For instance if you were dialing 339-1123, and if you dialed it really fast, it would trigger a call to emergency dispatch. Additionally it could even happen if 911 was dialed during an active call.

If that were still an issue, then a pulse 9 burried in a lot of other trash being interpreted at 1's could perhaps trigger it. I don't know a lot about the technical end of what caused it in the earlier days as I hadn't done much tech work at that time. I was exposed to it as a police officer/paramedic. I just remember when the city we were in first got 911 we responded to a LOT of 911 hang-ups.

I had the same thing happen too, except it was my youngest seeing if it really worked.

At a radio staion that I worked at, we had a WeCo 711B SxS pbx. to support dtmf, we had a set of decoders on the front of the pbx, which required a * to drop them out when you dialed an outside line.
Since this pbx was behind the campus pbx, we used 6 for outside lines, so from a dtmf phone, you would dial 6*9 to get a off-campus telco line.
The pbx would also pass dial pulses out to the campus pbx, and on to the telco.

normally, to dial "911" you would dial 6*9911, but guess what happened if you forgot the * when dialing 6*91 for off-campus 10 digit dialing?

You guessed it.. all of a sudden you were dialing 69911..

6(dtmf) - translated to pulse for station pbx = campus dialtone
9(dtmf) - passed to campus pbx + translated to pulse = off-campus dialtone
9(pulse) - passed to telco = 9
1(dtmf) - passed to telco + translated to pulse = 1
1(pulse) - passed to telco = 1

Yeah, but what PBX in the world would have "99XX" in their numbering plan, even in a 5/6/7 digit environment? Was this a problem or did it just happen to be something that was discovered? I am just curious since I can't imagine that the radio station got any support from the college itself.

Based upon your previous posts about the 711B, it sounds like the station was thrown to the wolves with regard to campus telecommunications.

" 9 in the middle of a lot of other trash? "

Not here that doesnt happen, as we have an office as 753-1911 and it doesnt call 911. But then again we dont have sophisticated equipment, we have Frontier lmao.

It's not an uncommon occurence. Seemed to get worse after the first good, soaking rains of winter.It was usually a swinging,intermittent short.External house wire, wet jack on an outside wall of a room, left-in drop, that sort of stuff. Ask someone who has a scanner about "welfare checks on 911 hangup" dispatches.