But suppose my phone starts to ring and whoever it may be lets it ring for, say, 15 rings (I don’t happen to have an answering machine either).
In that amount of time, somewhere between ring 4 and 5, another friend of mine tries calling me. Would they get a busy signal even though I’m not on the phone? Or doesn’t it matter since my phoneline would technically be tied up by someone else?
And I do have a point for asking this. Over the weekend, two friends of mine known for punctuality were supposed to call me at 5. I accidently told them the same time forgetting I told the other to call at the same time.
Pay no attention to the fact that I wasn’t even there to take either of their calls, I DID worry about this for about an hour or so…the fact that if one tried calling right when the other did, that one may get a busy signal, or perhaps even both of them would.
Can anyone shed any light on this? Does anyone know?
We experimented with this when I was much younger (30 years ago). At that time, in Boston at least, the second caller would get a busy signal. I’m guessing if you had call waiting both would get rings, but this is just a guess.
My friends and I tried calling one number from two separate other numbers, using the modem lines in our office. We dialed simultaneously, with one person pushing the last number on both phones.
It was about 50-50 chance that either calling line got a busy, but never did anything weird happen to indicate that both got a connection through simultaneously.
Another example: Once my housemate and I got two land lines for the townhouse he was buying. But the telephone tech wired both incoming lines for the same pair of interior wires - red-green - instead of one red-green and the other yellow-black. So when we’d make a call, we’d hear one dialtone because the sound is the same, even from two sources. But after we’d complete the call, we’d get a ring from the one line that connected and a busy from the other. So even with the same phone making the call (to insure absolute synchronicity), one line would always get a busy signal.
I would expect the reaction time of the phone system to make a connection is a very few seconds, maybe fractions of a second. The probability that they will call within a couple of seconds of each other is so close to zero that you would have to wait a long time for it to happen if your friends were both told to call you on the hour every hour every day. So one of them would be first and the second one would bet a busy signal.
Yeah, and then the second person would call back, and you wouldn’t pick up, and they’d wonder if you were avoiding them, since you had apparently just been on the phone. Is that what you (OP) were worried about?
Your line becomes “busy” when the CO at your end accepts the call from the trunk and begins ringing your line. Whether you’re talking or whether its still ringing is immaterial.
Likewise if your dog knocked the phone off the hoook 2 hours ago. Your line is still not in a condition to accept a call, therefore it’s “busy”.
Since this is all done with computers now, “simultaneous” calls are essentially impossible. The call process messages end up in a single queue in the switch and are handled chronologically by the mulitple processors. Regardless of the actual timing of your last digit press, at some level in the hardware they’re placed one after the other and dealt with accordingly, ie. the first caller siezes the line and the second caller gets a busy signal.