Tired of SPAM calls, we bought an ATT handset that offers ‘Smart Call Blocker’. When a call comes in from a phone not in our Directory or Allowed Caller list, the caller is given a message that we don’t want spam calls and if this isn’t a spam call, announce your name and press # key. For non Directory and Allowed list calls, this screening happens without the phone ringing, so we’re not bothered unless the call is legit.
I assumed that once the handset took the call and went thru the screening process, Verison/FIOS would treat the call as answered and be out of the picture.
But we found out by accident – V/F voicemail recorded one of the screening calls – that V/F is somehow keeping hold of the incoming call.
How can V/F stay in the loop if the handset has seemingly accepted the call?
We also have FIOS for internet service. And we use ATT modular telephones for our land line, configured the way you describe to avoid spam calls. It works well for us.
The difference is that we do not use Verizon for telephone service. Instead we use Voiply. This is cheaper. It also means we do not have Verizon voicemail.
In our configuration, there is a choice between using the voicemail that is built into the ATT system, or using the Voiply voicemail. We use the latter. I would think that there is some way to turn off Verizon voicemail if you prefer ATT voicemail.
This is not an endorsement of Voiply, just a statement of what we tried and is working. It is one of maybe a half dozen competing voice over IP companies.
This stuff has a learning curve. The first couple weeks it was confusing, but now that we are used to it, I can’t remember why it was confusing.
P.S. My biggest complaint with the ATT phones is that, as far as I can figure out, there is no wild card feature when you enter a friends and family telephone number you want to skip the screening. I wish we could have everything in the local hospital telephone exchange skip screening, so our doctors did not face it.
I always assumed the phone company’s role was to connect and incoming call to my phone. If the connection was made, i.e, I picked up the phone, the call was connected, or handed off, and the phone company went on its merry way, while I and my caller conducted our business.
But apparently when my ATT phone answers and puts the caller thru the screening process, Verizon is staying on the line because the screening process is picked up and recorded thru my Verizon voicemail.
Yes we can turn off Verizon voicemail but it’s more convenient than the ATT voicemail. Verizon sends us email notifications with the voicemail recording; allows us to selectively delete messages, with ATT its delete all messages or keep all messages.
But I do find the SmartBlock very effective and worth the price – a service all phone companies should have been offering.
I was addressing the so-called handoff issue only. The voicemail reference in the OP seems to refer to how they found out that the Teleco was still “in the loop”.
I think the wording in your title caused some confusion, because the terminology doesn’t match what you describe in your post. When Verizon delivers a call to your home phone, and you answer, it is not “handed off.” Verizon completes the circuit for the call and remains in control of the call. The term “hand off” is generally used when a call is handed off from one network provider to another, like when a cell call is handed off to the terrestrial network for completion, or when a cell call being handled by one cell tower is handed off to another tower.
As to your question, it sounds like the call screening tech is built into your phone (ATT-branded phone, nothing to do with AT&T’s network), and I would agree that the Verizon network shouldn’t be able to tell the difference between your phone screening the call for you vs. you picking up the phone. How much did the Verizon voicemail record? My phone knowledge predates VOIP (ask me about SS7) so I suppose there could be some kind of hiccup in the way your phone takes the call that does not let the network know the call was answered, but I do not know enough to explain if or how that’s possible.
If it only happened once, or at least very rarely, I would be inclined to think it was timing glitch aka race condition. Somewhere in the tiny gap between the telco’s voice mail and your handset’s screening there was a gap where both became active and the telco’s control logic didn’t manage to prevent this.
I would not be too surprised. Especially in a large telco network. Whilst one imagines a nice neat network routing of calls, once you add features like a telco provided voicemail, things get messy fast. The actual implementation of the voicemail might be on the other side of the country to you. There may be all manner of weird and strange mechanisms that manage the routing and control. Add a bit of congestion at just the right moment and you can easily get diverse parts of the network having contradictory ideas about what has just happened. Mostly this shouldn’t happen. But in practice, these are not simple systems, and engineering is done, not to guarantee zero glitches, but to corral the glitches into an acceptable number. Some glitches are provably impossible to reduce to zero. (I used to joke to my distributed systems class that you could smack the timing problem over the head, and drive it cowering into a corner, but you could never actually kill it.)