Incoming Long Distance

[RJVTF]

I do not receive all incoming calls which are long distance. Calling from my office, in the same city but long distance, to home, which has the VT service, I get a busy signal most of the time. The corporate office, same state, different city, always gets a busy signal. These show up on my incoming log as unanswered. The support group has not be able to solve this. I have sent my equipment models and setup several times. This seems to be the stock question from support. Next they tell me to call the phone company as the calls are coming from different switches. Do I have to call every phone company of those who may want to call me? I have set the DMZ. I have powered up and down as support has changed configs. Has anyone had this problem. If so, can you tell me what the correction was? Thankfully I did not port my number or stop my land line service. I connected back to it today. Hopefully someone has the answer. If not, I did not get anything free. $200 might only paid 4 months ATT service, but at least people can contact me.

[DracoFelis]

Next they tell me to call the phone company as the calls are coming from different switches. Do I have to call every phone company of those who may want to call me?
I know it's a PITA for you. However, if/when your phone can be reached reliably by some phone companies, and not from others, the problem is almost certainly on the end of the phone company that can't reach you. And that appears to be exactly what you are describing!

What is likely going on, is that the telco that can't reach you has been slow to properly update their "routing tables" to send calls for your number to ViaTalk. Telcos are each responsible for their own routing tables, and any telco that doesn't have the proper "route" to your number, won't allow their subscribers to call you. And the "fault" is with the calling telco when this happens (i.e. ViaTalk really can't fix it when this is going on, as the problem really isn't on their end, it's on the calling telcos end)!

Possible solutions:

1) You can wait a week or three and see if the problems go away on their own. Some telcos are better at updating their routing tables than others, but most of them do it at least every month or so (even without prompting). So sometimes a telco that has having problems calling you, will eventually get around to updating their routing tables, and calls will then work. Which is why the "hurry up and wait" approach often "fixes" this problem.

2) For those people who can't wait (or those people that have a telco that doesn't seem to fix this problem in a reasonable length of time), calling the offending telco and having them fix the problem is usually the only answer. In general this usually works best coming from their own customers (i.e. have your friend who's trying to call you complain to their telco that they can't reach you, vs you complaining to their telco that you can't be reached). Most telcos (if you get past the 1st clueless level of support) will update their routing tables when you let them know they are out of date (and therefore legit calls aren't going through)...

NOTE:
If you port your number ANYWHERE (not just to ViaTalk), expect the exact same hassles after the number porting process (because the number porting process also requires telcos to update their routing tables).

[DracoFelis]

I just realized that this question (and therefore also my reply) were posted in the wrong forum, as this is clearly a ViaTalk VoIP question, not a web hosting question (and we appear to be in one of the web hosting forums).

Moderator? Could you please move this thread to the proper ViaTalk forum?

[RJVTF]

I've been on for seven weeks, which should be enough time. However, I have 22 months to go. If you are right, maybe someday I can cancel my land line.
Thanks for the info.

[DracoFelis]

I've been on for seven weeks, which should be enough time.
I would tend to agree. It SHOULD be enough time.

However, since it apparently isn't (as you seem to still be having this problem), you might want to have the person calling you put in a problem report to their telco. Since the problem shows up with their LD calls, you might want to have them report this issue to their LD carrier...