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I provide Technical support for Incarnate Word Church and we recently purchased an 8 line Enterprise Edition of Broadcast by Phone. We tested using the shareware for a month or so and are very pleased with the results. We purchased the Enterprise edition last week and ran a full calling list message as a test yesterday. The list contains 322 phone numbers. Things went well but we do have a couple of questions that can help us fine tune our list and methods. We are using 1 Voicent modem and 7 Unlimited Skype lines. I have searched the Troubleshooting help and FAQ’s and didn’t find any answers to these questions.

1) The first number seems to fail about 50% of the time with this status; “Line disconnected, call did not go through.” What does this mean and what can we do to correct it?

This is likely related to the first modem line. Whenever you have that error message, it means somehow the system think the phone number called is disconnected. The detection is done by analyzing the incoming audio from the modem line. This could be misleading, especially when the line is not clear. To improve the accuracy, make sure the phone line does not have call waiting, or voicemail signal, and use a short phone cord to connect the modem to the wall jack. Basically, the clearer the line, the better the detection.

2) We received about 38 failures out of the 322, so about 12%. Not bad, but these failures returned 4 different status.

Failed. No Answer
Failed. No Answer. Auto Disconnected after 8 rings.
Failed. Line Occupied.
Failed. Line Occupied. Misc Error

Can you explain the difference for each of these statuses? If we can understand what each mean then we can address the issue.

The first two are actually not failures.

“No answer”: no one picks up the phone and the line is disconnected by the phone company. It is likely there is no answring machine
“No answer: auto disconnect after 8 rings”: no one picks up the phone, and after 8 rings, Voicent software hangs up the call

“Line Occupied”: Voicent software cannot get dial tone from the phone line. You may want to increase the hangup time (gateway > Setup > Options &Outbound tab) so the line can be properly disconnected.

“Line Occupied: Misc Error”: This error is from Skype. For more details, you need to take a look at the Skype window. It should give you more info on the error.

3) We are using the WebApps to make our recording and start the calls. It works well and is easy for our School Principal. However during our testing we once started calls using the incorrect list. Is there a way to stop the calls? I tried to open Broadcast by Phone app locally, but the Stop Broadcast was not enabled. I also reviewed the command Line help and I don’t see a command to stop calls, only startnow. Any thoughts are appreciated?

Thank you very much for you help. We are all very pleased with the Broadcast by Phone system, thanks.

The only way to stop the broadcast is to kill the BroadcastByPhone process (vcast.exe). For that, you should use general Windows facilities/commands to do that. The WebApps included with BroadcastByPhone is no longer supported but it is open source, so you can change it anyway you want.