Intermittent beeps before dial tone

[hxcanada]

I am new to FreePhoneLine. I just purchased VoIP Unlock Key and put it on my Cisco SPA112 ATA. However, I always get intermittent beeps before dial tone when I lift my phone. Is this normal?

[Jake]

That sounds like you have a voicemail waiting. Call *98 (or your FPL number) and see if you have a voicemail there. You can also check online.

[hxcanada]

No. There is no voicemail. I even left voicemails, and then delete all voicemails, I still get 6~8 beeps before the dial tone. It sounds like connecting. Every time, when I pick up the phone, I will here those intermittent beeps before the dial tone.

[hxcanada]

Actually, you are right! It just takes time. After I remove the voice message, after unknown amount of time, the intermittent beeps will eventually go away. Thanks.

[mitwtim]

I haven't checked lately, but when I first changed us over to FPL several years ago my wife was really unhappy about the delay in voicemail registrations. We were used to an instantaneous toggle on/off with either Bell's traditional copper lines or even with Rogers Home Phone. After a lot of testing and discussions with support it seems that FPL/Fongo doesn't register a change when a caller leaves a voicemail or a customer clears a voicemail. Instead they use a set cycle to poll through every single account and either make the call waiting indicator light (and dial tone) change to indicate there is a voicemail waiting, or register that there is no longer an unheard voicemail there. That cycle used to take roughly ten minutes, so you could expect a change somewhere between a few minutes or 10 minutes, it just depended on where you were at during that particular 10 minutes cycle. I still maintain this a waste of resources, and it should be possible to have a separate database that would register only the accounts that have experienced a change of activity, instead of polling all of them. I even suggested making it an option that people have to opt into in the account settings. It really only affects those of us using it as a home phone. For any using cell phone apps, or maybe even desktop apps too, they don't even need that feature. I would bet they could cut out a lot of accounts that are currently being polled if they asked users to opt-in to a MWI (message waiting indicator) feature. I'm still holding out hope that will happen. It's honestly the one feature that is preventing me from recommending FPL/Fongo to our friends, when they ask about it. I feel it is something to clarify if I know they currently are using a traditional home phone system.