provided by Star2Billing S.L.

Hello every1 !

Maybe somebody knows a fast and easy way of turn off A2B prompts like on BUSY or NO ANSWER. As you probably already know, A2B plays its message whem the called party is busy aaand we hear ...USER IS BUSY.. and this is weird.

Any help is appreciated

Does 'play_audio = NO' in a2billing.conf not achieve this?

Its not that easy... for example it doesnt turns off CARDNUMBER IS ALREADY IS USE prompt which is simply the same as busy.

You could create a set of blank audio prompts, save them in a subfolder called 'mt' (for empty, geddit?) and set the customer(s) in question with language 'mt'.

Yeah, probably.. that's what I consider a hard way Empty files wont do the trick, I still have to alert caller somehow so files gotta be with busy signal and whatever else.

That's the easiest way I can think of without modifying the code. I'm guessing you'd rate that as even more difficult, so I shan't go into it.

Simply pick up your landline and call a busy number and record the busy signal. Save this in a GSM file format and with the same name as the other file that is playing now. Rename old file with bac EXT and put your new file in same folder/directory. Your customers will then get a busy signal instead of the recorded voice prompt. I think Asterisk web site might even have this recording.

Unless I am doing something wrong A2b really falls short in this area of informing customer’s the reasons for their call not being successful. For an example. If customers enters too many digits and presses #. That call will be placed and more likely then not it will be refused by a voip carrier even if the first 11 or so digits are a valid number. I think the caller will get a recording “That number is unavailable” and the same recording for a number with too few digits. If I am not mistaking I think a2b customers will even get the same recording if your a2b server lose connection to the company you terminating calls with.

This can be very disastrous if your service goes down once in a while (which is not uncommon for some or even if your provider goes down which you have no control of) and customers keep hearing the “that number is unavailable” message and after a while when they get the same message no matter who they call they will figured out your service is down and from that point on each time they get that “that number is unavailable” even if the number is truly busy they will have an uneasy feeling because they are uncertain if its busy or if something else is wrong. Some customers who have strong feeling about how important their calls are, will cancel because of this.

In my opinion it is just plain wrong that customers are fooled into thinking the number they are calling is busy instead of being told the service is temporary down so they can either wait for the service to work or if the call is important they will be able to call it using some other method if they know the number is not actually busy.

This hadn't occurred to me until you stated it like this. I agree this is an area that could use some work.
Additionally the CDRs would be more useful if they included the Asterisk variable hangupcause. Currently we have dialstatus but it seems to only insert one of six values: "", "BUSY", "CONGESTION", "CHANUNAVAIL", "NOANSWER", or "ANSWER". Storing hangupcause too would help eliminate false positives for the alarms system in v1.4.