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Ideas to improve the MWI (Voicemail Message Waiting Alert)

PostPosted: 02/27/2012
by mitwtim
I am posting this here, because I noticed I posted it under the FAQ section last week. Sorry about that, if it is possible to delete that post that would be great.

I ported my family phone number over to FPL about a year and a half ago. In terms of stability there have been some hickups. For the most part it has been quite good. One nagging issue that I am reminded of constantly is the performance of the Message Waiting Indicator that changes the dial-tone and tells our home phones to indicate there is a voicemail waiting.

The delays in waiting for for the MWI to be triggered due to the 10 minutes interval at which the accounts are polled to see if there are either new voicemails waiting, or if voicemails have now been listened to and the light should be turned of has been the biggest criticism of this service in our household.

What has made matters worse is that the 10 minute interval (which used to be a 5 second maximum delay with our old provider) has now grown to be 30 minutes or more and for the past at least two weeks it has been stuck turned on.

I made this suggestion a while ago. I thought I'd pitch it again and see if anything has changed now that the Fongo name is here and I presume customers are still increasing with the additiona of the Bud and Dell programs.

Wouldn't it be worth considering the following upgrades/design changes?
1) Develop a trigger than can be initiated as soon as a voicemail is left. For simplicity sake, that trigger could be building a list of accounts (phone numbers) as voicemails are left for them. Instead of polling all the accounts in the time period that used to take 10 minutes (but is now longer) only touch the accounts that have been added to that list and then wipe the list. Same thing goes for once a voicemail has been heard, add that number to the list to have the MWI flipped off.
2) To further cut down on resource load, send an email to everyone saying that you are changing the MWI service, to an opt-in service. All they need to do is login to their account and on the voicemail section have a check-box. For new users leave it off by default.

Those are just two ideas I have thought of.