Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the '10.3: Enable Distinctive Ring fax answering' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
10.3: Enable Distinctive Ring fax answering
Authored by: extrememac on Jul 12, '05 11:52:04AM

For those of you that have a newer internal mac modem and/or you can't make the string provided above, I recieved the following from page sender;

That technique won't work with newer Apple Internal Modems. Only quite old ones had support for distinctive ring and that support went away when Apple moved to the soft firmware Apple Internal Modems about five years ago (give or take).

Distinctive ring is basically a subset of the issue of sharing a line. It's a hardware feature which is not supported by your Apple Internal Modem. Here's what we send folks inquiring about sharing a line. Same applies to distinctive ring:

Differentiating incoming calls is a hardware function which Apple Internal Modems don't do. My fax machine can differentiate voice and fax calls. It does this by answering all calls immediately. It then provides its own electronic ring sound (and continues to ring the attached telephone) to reassure voice callers while it "listens" for fax calling tones. If it "hears" a fax calling tone, it answers. Otherwise it continues to ring. For good measure, it picks up with a fax answer tone after six rings in case the incoming fax machine isn't sending calling tones.

I suspect the reason Apple Internal Modems do not offer this functionality is that they only have one jack and so can't control the ringing on the line (whereas my fax machine controls both its built-in phone and anything attached to its phone jack). My fax machine also allows me to pick up on another line and dial *0 to indicate that I've picked up and it should stop ringing and/or listening. Perhaps Apple could have done something like that, but they did not.

I know that boxes which provide just the "listening" function then "ring through" to either the fax machine or phone depending on the type of call are available at places like Radio Shack in the US. I have no idea if similar boxes are available in your area. To get what you want, you'll need to combine this hardware solution with Page Sender hooked up to the "fax" output of the box and your answering machine hooked up to the "voice" output of the box.

Thanks for using pagesender from SmileOnMyMac!

Regards,

pagesender Support
support@pagesender.com



[ Reply to This | # ]