I agree with k2dave. Your callers should not be hearing ringback if you don’t have call waiting or some similar feature. Another quick check you might make - just try to make a *70 call waiting-less call. If you don’t have call waiting, you should get a busy signal on the *70.
Well, I posted this whole thing on a computer tech MB and the moderator came back with:
Does this make sense to anyone? Would this be why the old computer with its Sierra 14.4 Data Fax Voice SQ3230 modem disconnects me and the new one, a Conexant SoftK56 PCI modem, doesn’t, because it hears the tone differently, or has a different response, or something?
Eh, Cranky, yeah, I’m sure this is what I want. Weird, I know, and bad for my blood pressure, definitely. Also bad for my “Mom In Control” image, when I get bumped in the middle of a hot Reply window for phone calls from La Principessa’s social set (“I can’t talk now, my mom’s on the message board again…” "Well, I was until Courtney decided she had to talk about school–you just saw her 10 minutes ago…"), or worse, from telemarketers, or even worse, and guaranteed to make the children perk up their ears at Mom’s bad language, yet another of Juno’s pointless one ring “gotcha!” disconnects.
Anyway.
Ethilrist, yah, I stumbled across that on a computer tech MB–the default for my new modem for Disabling Call Waiting includes “70#” and “1170”, and I saw “*70” suggested somewhere else. However, so far I have tried “70#” and nothing happened–The Cat Who Walks Alone had to go to Wal-Mart anyway (she had to make an emergency lip gloss run), so she dialed us twice from there, let it ring and ring, nothing happened. At this end we heard nothing at all, and we’re sure we were connected 'cause I changed the Dialing Properties thingie in Telephony as she was going out the door and sat Bonzo down and told him, “Now, you MUST remain connected to your Pokemon hints website until Sister gets back from Wal-Mart.” He’s so brave…
But that’s interesting, suggesting changing it to something completely bogus, like my birthday. Does it have to have * and/or # in it?
And if I don’t have Call Waiting in the first place, why would my computer think I do? Why would Disabling Call Waiting affect anything?
Thanks, User10K, but you’re probably not aware you’re talking to somebody who screamed Blue Murder last week because Juno raised its price from $4.95 a month to $30.00. An extra $12 a month is not within our “we’re the slave of our computer” mindset or budget.
Thank you, Dave, I may actually try talking to the telephone company. They’re my friends, right? 
But it’s a brand-new modem, came installed in the e-Machines, I dunno how it could need repairs. Argh. And how do you test your line to see if you have call waiting? It honestly never even occurred to me that we might have had it all these years without realizing it. We don’t spend that much time on the phone (before the Internet, of course).
When we first got Juno (Free) Internet a year ago, incoming callers got a busy signal. People said, “I tried to call you ALL DAY yesterday and it was permanently busy, who were you talking to?” AFAIK we didn’t do anything at this end, although there were a couple of Juno/IE5 Uninstalls and Reinstalls along the way, IIRC, but suddenly we discovered that incoming callers were bumping us off the Internet. Weird, but not unwelcome.
Yabob:
Um–what? Click on Disable Call Waiting, with *70 entered in the little box? And this should do–what? If we’re connected to the Internet, an incoming phone call should then get a busy signal? Is that what you’re saying?
How do other people’s computers handle the problem of incoming phone calls? Surely I can’t be the only person with this problem. Does everybody else in the world shell out the twelve bucks for a second dedicated phone line?
I hate this. :mad:
I don’t know about what other people did, but I wasn’t about to shell out extra money for a phone line. If someone wanted to call me when I was online, too bad. They’d have to wait until I got of the 'net. It was a long wait too, because that computer was connected at least 5 hours a day.
That all changed once I got cable though. The question is though: is having your phone free a good thing? at least 25% of the calls I recieve are hang-up calls. I have no idea why though…
All I meant with *70 was to try it on your phone - nothing to do with the computer. I’m still wondering why your callers are getting ringing when they should get a busy signal if you don’t have call waiting. The *70 is the usual thing you are supposed to dial before a call if you have call waiting to turn it off for a call. I meant that you could dial *70 on your phone and see if you got a busy signal (like mine does) right after the *70, or if it waits for some more numbers, which would help confirm that you MIGHT have call waiting whether you thought you did or not. You might also check your phonebook to make sure that *70 is the code to dial, though that is nearly universal. That’s why your modem mentions some other codes.
That’s the reason I also suggested that you simply test the way your phone behaves with no computers involved by having a friend explicitly call you while you are on another normal phone call to see if they hear ringing or a busy tone, and so you could explicitly listen for a call waiting beep or click. Some of them are very hard to notice if you aren’t listening for them.
If normal phone calls are getting “busy signal” treatment, this puts this in a whole new section of the twilight zone.
If you really do have call waiting, the rest of this advice begins to apply, and means your new modem is being clever and ignoring call waiting beeps, whereas your old one got disconnected and hung up, then allowing the waiting call to ring your phone.
Or, I should have said your new modem is being clever and circumventing call waiting. It may just be dialing the prefix for you.
Anyway, yeah, when I was using dialup I just got a line for the computer. I don’t know what your budget is, but that was one reason I felt that DSL was a no-brainer at some point. The price difference between cheap residential DSL on a single line with a splitter and a dialup account with 2 lines just wasn’t that much. That may mean you have to use telco-supplied DSL (the cheapest way to go, anyway), though it does NOT mean you have to use your telco for your ISP. I’ve had no problems with carrying on phone conversations while surfing with my splitter equipped DSL line.
to test call waiting you need some help or other phone lines.
1 Talk to someone on you line. (not ringing but actual conversation.
2 have someone call you or call yourself (by cellphone or other line)
3a is the line in step 2 busy or ringing?
3b if ringing do you hear a tone on the line in step 1?
let me know the answer to 3a and 3b if you still need help in finding out if you have call waiting
Well, the Better Half finally got home from work and I ran this all past him (“is it possible we’ve had call waiting all this time without realizing it?”) and he thought about it for a while and said, yeah, actually, McLeod USA might have made him pop for the whole package, way back when. We don’t get that many phone calls, so we might not have noticed any “hey, incoming” clicking or beeping. Sheesh.
So my mission tomorrow is to call McLeod USA and find out.
We also racked our brains and realized that what we think changed, way back when, from “not getting disconnected” to “getting disconnected” was probably the upgrade from Juno 3.0 to Juno 4.0, issued when Juno started offering free Internet a year ago. Seem to recall the problem of “people can’t get through to us” quote-unquote “fixed itself” about that time.
The B.H. asked around at the Post Office what other people do about the problem of incoming phone calls, and the consensus seems to be that it’s one of the following:
- Get a second phone line.
- Resign yourself to people getting busy signals.
- Get cable Internet access.
Nobody seems to have heard of being bumped off the Internet by incoming phone calls. Maybe it’s something special that Juno invented, just for us. :rolleyes:
DDG, this is now at least making sense. The decision to ring-thru or give a busy signal is done at the phone company Central Office, not at your computer. Features like call-waiting or forward on busy will ring-thru, without them, callers should get a busy signal.
Call-waiting doesn’t actually disconnect a modem, it just disturbs the carrier. It sounds like your old modem couldn’t recover from the carrier disruption and the new on can. The “fixed itself” part was probably because the disable call-waiting option was on in one version and not the other. By using *70 or whatever the proper code is for your phone company, callers should have gotten a busy signal, which you said they did in the beginning.
If you don’t want to get a 2nd line or cable/dsl service, then you’ll either have to disable call waiting and let people get busy signals or get a “Call-Catcher” or something similar,as mentioned earlier.
Jim
This sounds like a job for… “Internet Call display”!
I have a feature from the phone company called “Internet call display”. I got some software from the phone company that goes into my computer. When I’m online, and a call comes in, the phone company signals the software on my computer through the active internet connection, while providing a message to the caller “Your call is being processed”. I get a little box on the screen with number and possibly name.
I can choose to drop the internet connection, at which point my phone will ring. Alternatively, I can let the call go to a previously-chosen forwarding number (I chose the voicemail of my cellphone), or just let it be dropped.
It costs me $5/month.
Bell’s info: http://www.bell.ca/en/minisite/products/icd2/app_frameset.asp
Dunno about you guys but I prefer a cheap pager ($2 month) so they just page me if they get a busy signal 
Okay, I talked to McLeod USA and they confirm that we have indeed had call waiting since December 1999. :rolleyes: We’re supposed to hear a beep, he said, but none of us ever noticed.
So anyway, I’d like to thank everybody who participated in this thread for being so patient, and I am now going to print it out for the Better Half’s perusal while we decide what to do. Probably something like Call Catcher, I dunno.
And I’m still curious as to how the Teeming Millions handle this.
(We’ve tried both 70# and 1170 and neither of them produces a busy signal or disconnects from the Internet. So I don’t really “get” what the point of having “Disable Call Waiting” is, if it’s not to bump you off the Internet when somebody else wants to talk to you, but never mind.)
At the risk of running this into the ground:
The purpose of having “disable call waiting” is the other way around. Background:
The call waiting beep historically interfered with modem signalling, effectively disconnecting a dialup session, whether that was what was supposed to happen or not. In response, the phone company gave you a code like *70, 70# or 1170 you could dial before dialing a number to say “I don’t want this call to get beeped, so please turn off call waiting, just for this call”. This allowed people to dial up connections and not have the CW beep kill them. Check your phone book for the exact code to use with your call waiting service.
The modem’s “disable call waiting” feature indicates that you want it to keep call waiting from interfering with your connection, by having the modem automatically dial the “please don’t interrupt with call waiting” prefix ahead of any numbers it dials.
And to further run it into the ground, some modems may be able to tolerate the call waiting beep without getting disconnected.
That was what the tech you talked to was getting at with the “disconnect with loss of carrier” setting. In other words, you may be able to fiddle with your modem to make it sensitive enough to the CW beep to disconnect like your old one did.
If your callers are getting ringing, that would indicate that CW was not disabled via the appropriate prefix, and your modem was able to tolerate the beep without getting disconnected. If you can get the “disable call waiting” to work right, they should get a busy signal, and will at least know “Ducky’s on the computer again.”.