Pulse Dialing

Posts: 59 · Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 8:16 am Post subject: Pulse Dialing

I've recently been in a heated debate at work over pulse dialing. I've read through here and a few other places where Vonage, almost always, doesn't work with pulse dialing. Through my personal experiences as a Vonage tech, I've yet to get a pulse dialing device of any sort work on a Vonage line, ever. Yet my co-worker has an unfounded argument that it does because it's a phone and all phone work with Vonage. What about a 30 year old rotary phone? I spent 2 hours trying to get it to work, but never did.

What's your luck/experience with pulse dialing? Ever get it to work? If so, please, in detail, describe how. It's something I am very curious about and need some information. Thank you in advance.

Posts: 260 · Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 9:00 am Post subject:

Vonage says that it does not support pulse

http://www.vonage.com/help.php?article=458

Some people have used Tone to DTMF converter with Voip successfully.

http://www.dialerbuddy.com/lpt300.htm

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Dial+Pulse+to+Touchtone+DTMF+Converters

Posts: 59 · Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 10:05 am Post subject:

Thank you for your response.

I read over the link that points to the Vonage Help section of the Vonage website. After reading through it, it doesn't state that Vonage doesn't support pulse dialing. I states when troubleshooting for No Dial Tone, that you make sure the phone is set to tone, not to pulse, but that alone doesn't state that it is supported or compatible with Vonage.

Posts: 260 · Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 10:13 am Post subject:

Hearing a dial tone or not is not determined by tone or pulse setting. If Vonage web site says to use tone setting, that is a good indicator.

Voip phone adapters work by converting audio to digital. Pulse is not audio, so to support pulse, there needs to some extra circuitry in the adapter to handle it.

Posts: 4777 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: Aug 30, 2005 Posts: 4777

Right. I suppose it's possible that some model of some adapter has that extra circuitry.

Posts: 260 · Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 10:11 pm Post subject:

I could be wrong, but I doubt that the manufacturer of an ATA would spend the extra $ to support pulse dialing.

Posts: 58 · Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 11:23 pm Post subject: Re: Pulse Dialing

Nidae213 wrote:

Yet my co-worker has an unfounded argument that it does because it's a phone and all phone work with Vonage. What about a 30 year old rotary phone? I spent 2 hours trying to get it to work, but never did.

Try this explanation on your co-worker. In a Voip situation, your dialing request isn't sent out via audio that is translated by your phone company into a (virtual) circuit to the person you want to call. In the case of Voip, the signal for the phone number you want to dial is converted by your Voip router into a URL, which is then included in the SIP initiation packet.

So it's really up to your router to intercept the dialing information and do something with it to setup the virtual circuit. Vonage doesn't directly know nor care about Pulse vs. Tone dialing, because it never reaches their servers. The trick to getting pulse to work would be to find a Voip router that understands pulse dialing.

There is nothing that prevents a Voip manufacturer from creating such a device -- it just seems rather pointless for the most part (as the bulk of the world moved on to tone more than twenty years ago).

So in a sense neither of you are right based on technical merits -- but you're correct on more practical merits. One would have to check every Voip router out there to see if anyone has made a model which supports pulse dialing (I'm sure this forum has users with a wide variety of such hardware, but the problem in asking people to try it out is that most of us would probably have a hard time digging up a pulse dial phone Smile

).

Yaz.

Posts: 4777 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: Aug 30, 2005 Posts: 4777

vonalink wrote:

I could be wrong, but I doubt that the manufacturer of an ATA would spend the extra $ to support pulse dialing.

Agreed.

Posts: 1715 · Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2006 12:26 am Post subject:

Rotary/pulse dialing is a function of the ATA in use. From what I've seen, the Sipura-based devices (PAP2, RT31P2, WRT54GP2) only support DTMF, while the Texas-Instruments-based devices (RTP300, PAP2 v2.0) do appear to support some pulse dialing.

Posts: 34 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Apr 21, 2005 Posts: 34

I have a lot of experience with this issue. My hobby is collecting old Western Electric phones (including rotary). When I got Vonage I was under the impression that pulse dialing would work. My friend had the VT1005 ATA and it did indeed accept pulse dialing. However, the RT31P2 does not. I have the RT31P2. What I did to make use of my rotary phone was to hook up the Mitel Smart 1 dialer in front of all of them. This is a cool device that can be programmed to do whatever you want. I programmed it to translate pulse dialing into tone. So it hears pulse then converts that to tone which it sends out to the RP31P2. It does the same with DTMF. I even set it up to have a speed dial. So I press * or 11 and a two digit number from 20-99 and it will do a programmed speed dial. I also blocked 411 and 555-1212.