MWI - Message Waiting Indication

[Funkytown]

MWI does not work for me again and I cant see if there are new messages stored as it aint flashing ....
Any updates on why or when this will be working again?

Thanks

[FONGO_steve]

Anyone else able to confirm this on their accounts?

My test unit on my desk still seems to be functioning. I'll be able to reach the programmers first thing 8am on Monday if this problem has come back for any of you.

[Funkytown]

Thanks, Steve.

[brentw]

This is an issue for me.
I have tested it on 2 different lines/ata's.
Both no longer indicate a voicemail is waiting.

Could you also ask the programmers to look at having the MWI update more frequently?
Last time I checked on it a few weeks ago it took a long time for the MWI to clear after deleting messages.
To the point where I missed a voicemail because I incorrectly assumed it was one I already checked and the MWI just hadn't updated yet.

Thanks

[bouckster]

my message indicator has been on for about a week it keeps saying there is a message but there actually isnt any way to clear it.

Thanks
Chris

[tigerking]

Count me in folks.

My MWI on my Grandstream HT286 ATA is not working with FPL too. (It was working with my company's VoIP server in the past few years).

I PM my FPL# to Steve on Oct 28, 2010 but still waiting for a reply. Steve, please check your in-box (PM from tigerking) and get back to me ASAP.

The MWI was working on my softphone with my FPL# few days ago and then I decided to purchase the configuration file and activated my Grandstream HT286 ATA.

However, the MWI was never work on the ATA.

I set up my Grandstream to subscribe to the MWI periodically.
I tried to leave a new voice message to my voice mail box.
However, wait for a few days, the MWI Button never came on flashing. Never flash to indicate new message waiting.

I am sure the MWI was working on my ATA as I used it for few years with my company's VoIP server as an extension line. When ppl called me and left me messages, the MWI lighted up within a few seconds. After I retrieved the voice message, it went off in 5 seconds.

I would like FPL sincerely fix the MWI issue as it has been causing too many troubles for many users already.

New users like me committed to FPL service by purchasing the configure file for $50 and I hope I won't be pissed off by not aware of new and important messages.

I am counting on the "Enhanced Voice Message" system that FPL claimed on their feature set and stop using my present voice message system on my existing phone line.

My plan is to call forward my existing home phone to my FPL number and use one phone (with FPL ATA) to answer incoming and making outgoing calls.

After that, I can cancel the voice message, call waiting, three way call, etc. extra features from my home phone. Save money as per FPL claimed and divert phone traffic through FPL network so that we shall have a win-win situation. i.e. FPL make money from incoming trunk calls from other carriers and I can save money in cancelling additional features on my home phone.

[brentw]

MWI is working now.
Though it still took just under 10 minutes for it to show a voicemail.
Can't this be set faster?
This is a big sticking point, if at home and a call comes in and I can't answer the call for some reason or don't get to the phone in time it means I don't know there is a voicemail for 10 minutes.
With my old Rogers home phone this would be updated pretty much instantly, same with Bell.

I want to recommend some more of my friends switch over to FPL, but I know that this will really be an issue with them.
Other than this, FPL is the same as Rogers or Bell, this one change would make it a direct comparision to them features wise having everything and more.

10 minutes may not seem long but when you are sitting staring at the phone timing it, it really is a long time.
Even if it was say every 30 seconds that would be a lot better than this 10 minutes.

[tigerking]

Good to hear that MWI come back for some users.

I got the quick response from FPL to my PM (excellent efficiency!) asking me to reboot the ATA to see if the WMI will be back (I am currently in the office and already reboot the ATA remotely. I shall check it at home tonight).

Anyway, I just tested it on my X-Lite 4 SIP phone in my Laptop a minutes ago, and it works! Of course, the MWI didn't come up immediately after login, it took about 10 minutes. There are still a lot of rooms to improve as suggested by "brentw" it would be great if the waiting time for WMI trigger is less than 30 seconds.

Anyhow, it is better than nothing. FPL keep up the good work and bring our comments to your developer.

I shall come home and verify if the MWI will work on my GrandStream HT286 and update this post to report back.

Update after come home:

The MVI indicator work on my home ATA too.

It take a bit longer to flash light on the ATA (10 minutes) after bootup the ATA or leave a new message and it take 3-5 minutes for the flash light go off after retrieved the message.

However, I still have a problem in retrieving voice mail using my phone attached to the ATA.

I set the DTMF insertion to "in-audio" that work with most PSTN IVR systems.

My version of Grand Stream ATA 286 only allow me to chose one type of DTMF insertion. Either "in-audio" or "RTP RFC2833" or "SIP info"

If I use the phone attached to the ATA to make FPL *98 or remote access line call the FPL server didn't response to any key I punched down after connected and hear the IVR prompt.

BUT it is never work with calling FPL *98 or remote access number. The FPL seems ignore the in-audio DTMF if it receive call from phone within the network. I tried with a different analogue phone that work by calling the FPL remote access number using other VoIP provider's network.

I tried to use that different VoIP phone connect to other network provider (also set to in-audio) and call the remote access number to retrieve my voice mail message, that works and respond to the key depressed.

However, the same phone used on the ATA configured to FPL is not working by calling *98 or the remote access number!

I then reconfig the ATA attached to FPL and choose either via "RTP RFC2833" or "SIP INFO" and it worked with FPL voice message system by accessing both *98 and the remote access number. The server respond to the key pressed.

However, with this setting, it won't work with my company voice mail system and most telephone banking using other PSTN phone system that need in-audio DTMF.

I PM'ed FPL for help to identify if there is a bug injected to my account during the server upgrade to let the FPL inter network SIP phone call accept "RTP RFC2833" or "SIP INFO" call only and ignore in-audio DTMF?

If yes, would it be possible to support both in-audio and RTP RFC2833?

It is a bit inconvenience to use other phone to retrieve voice message or I need to reset the ATA for different DTMF insertion method.

I wold like to see home many people have the same problem?

Note: Using softphone (with DTMF set to in-band) have no problem access the *98 or remote access number, why there are difference between ATA and Softphone.

[Funkytown]

Yup it now works, I would imagine it started working some time today.

I also agree that the MWI blinking can be lowered to around 20 seconds at most.

Thanks

[FONGO_steve]

A patch was applied yesterday which should help solve the intermittent MWI issues as well as those occasional voicemail crashes that a lot of you had reported witnessing.

Please feel free to let us know of any other bugs or concerns you may identify - moving forward, we are looking to make our new server as robust as we can!

tigerking - I'll check my PMs momentarily and get back to you.

[brentw]

Hi Steve,

What about this 10 minute delay for the MWI updating?

I just tested again and it is still at 10 minutes.
If I miss a call I assume there is no voicemail, then up to 10 minutes later I get the prompt on my phone that there's a voicemail, and chances are it's of course someone saying call me back right away...and now it's been 10 minutes because I didn't know I had a voicemail.

Like I said before I can't recommend FPL to my friends anymore because of this, up to 10 minutes to know you have a voicemail compared to Rogers or Bell who are pretty much instant, I'm not taking the heat from friends on this because I agree with them that 10 minutes is way to long to be notified so I can no longer recommend FPL if this is not going to be fixed.



Can't this be cranked down to 30 seconds?
Or better yet 10 seconds??



Please let us know.

Brent

[laurent]

I know this isn't a solution to your problem, but just to point out that, in my case, I don't actually care if MWI works at all because all my voice messages are sent to me as emails, and those are instantaneous. 5 seconds after I'm done talking, my email rings in my mobile phone.

[qwerty]

Hello I purchased a pre-configured FPL ATA ( Thomson 784 ) and the MWI have never worked for me no matter how long I waited (even when it worked for others). I spoke to tech support on 3 different occations and was told I would get a call back ... still waiting. So I am taking it into my own hands. I have notice that my ATA has a setting to chose the MWI network type (either solicited or unsollicited). It is currently set as "sollicited" but there is no MWI address and port assigned to it so that the ATA can "fetch/pull" the MWI information. So, what should the MWI address and port setting be? Or should I set the setting to "unsollicited" and have FPL "push" the MWI tone to the ATA?

Help is greatly appreciated....

[brentw]

Hi qwerty,

My guess would be unsolicited since it is the FPL server that sends out the info, we can't pull it from the server.
For fun if you plug the ATA directly into your modem does it happen to work?
Make sure you leave it for at least 10 minutes since the current update interval for MWI seems to be that long.

[brentw]

I do have voicemail setup to go to email.
And it comes through in about 10 seconds which is great.
But I don't check my email that often.

If an email can come through in 10 seconds, I don't understand why the MWI on the phone/ata itself couldn't be set to update that often instead of the current 10 minutes or so.

I don't get how this isn't an issue for more poeple, does no one use the FPL voicemail?

If there is a reason that MWI update has to be 10 minutes then fine, but so far I haven't heard anything from FPL.

[mitwtim]

I know this isn't a solution to your problem, but just to point out that, in my case, I don't actually care if MWI works at all because all my voice messages are sent to me as emails, and those are instantaneous. 5 seconds after I'm done talking, my email rings in my mobile phone.

Yes, laurent I have taken to doing this, after of course my account was "fixed" so I could actually make that change, but that is another issue. That is a good idea, but will not work for everyone. For those of us who are living in houses with people who rely on a phone to work properly this is a serious issue. My wife would fall into that category.

If it is simply that FPL doesn't understand why MWI is important here is a real-life example as to how the MWI delay is causing a tremendous amount of strife at my house. We have several young children who require assistance doing a lot of things. So, it often is not possible to drop everything and run to the phone, unless we are willing to spend the next hour cleaning up some sort of disastor/mess. Often we end up missing a call and if the person leaves a message we call them back within two minutes. But, when you don't know there is a message for 10 minutes, by the time you call the people back they could no longer be available. This happened a couple days ago, members of our extended family happened to be driving near our house, they called to see if we were home so they could come by for a visit. We missed the call, because we were busy with the kids. By the time we called them back more than 10 minutes later they were already across town. I could list a number of other examples, but I hope this illustrates why we are so frustrated.

With regards to checking your email to see if you have received a voicemail. Ya, I pitched this to my wife and almost caught a phone in the teeth. I don't think that is a solution that will work for everyone. I will say it is a cool feature that is a nice addition to the normal phone feature set you would could get elsewhere, but it is not a substitute for a functioning MWI.

I do not understand why Bell and Rogers can both update the MWI instantly and FPL can't do it at least every 30 seconds. Please fix this.

I would like to add my name to the list of people who are requesting the MWI be updated every 30 seconds or less.

[laurent]

I think people need to go back at the first sentence of my last post: "I know this isn't a solution to your problem"

I just mentioned something that can be done with the system because it works, not because it fixes anyone's problem. So please don't respond that my solution won't work with your wife or family. Of course it doesn't, I said so myself! I'm just pitching in that, in certain cases, it's cool to have. See it sa a "temporary work around." While we try and get FPL to accelerate the MWI delay, we can work around the issue by having an email sent in a way that notifies us quickly. My emails come on my cellphone, and I get a popup/sound as they get in, so I know of new voicemails very quickly. You could do something like that while the issue gets resolved, for example, in order to raise the Wife Acceptance Factor a bit

We have not got a response from FPL as to why it's so long for the MWI to take effect, however. I really wonder why... We've discussed this issue previously too, so I think it was the same on their old server (before the upgrade).

Perhaps call them directly and report exactly that as the issue? I'm not entirely sure how much of an effect this forum has on FPL's management. Steve and Kris are very helpful, but if we want to change a company policy, perhaps it should be done the old fashioned way: by calling and complaining

[mitwtim]

laurent: I understand that you didn't recommend the voicemail to email forwarding as a solution to the problem. My comments to that effect were not directed at you, but rather to FPL. I wanted to make it clear that the voicemail to email is not a solution to this problem. The problem is MWI being updated every 10 minutes. They need to get this fixed.

Okay, I just got off the phone with TechSupport and have been told they are not going to make any changes because it would mean polling all 45,000 accounts and would be too much load on their systems. I am very disappointed to hear this!

I am not a programmer, but I would suggest that it would be well worth your while to investigate creating a sub-group of clients, ones that have expressed a need to have a considerably more responsive MWI and have them polled more frequently. If the MWI is not a feature that many of your clients have expressed dissapointment with, then surely it would not represent the load of anywhere near the 45,000 total accounts you are talking about if you were to create a sub-group of accounts that are tagged to be polled more frequently.

For people like us in this forum (and you can be sure there are many others out there who can't be bothered creating a forum account and actually leaving messages) it would be very much appreciated.

FPL has the potential to win over customers from companies like Bell and Rogers hand over fist. But, it is much easier to do if you can promise the same features you are used to with those other companies. Throw in the odd extra feature that you can offer such as voicemail to email forwarding and I would expect your customer base to expand exponentially strictly through referrals. Right now I suspect that you have won over a lot of single people. People for whom the follow-me feature is a viable alternative to the MWI (to redirect calls to a cell phone). But, you are missing out on the familes that require a fully functional home phone to communicate.

The key is to start by offering the same service as your competitors though and a MWI that refreshes on or off only once every 10 minutes is nothing like the instaneous response offered elsewhere. I would bet that we would be happy with every 30 seconds, which is only 1/30th the amount of check-ins that it would take to make it instantaneous.

I really think it shouldn't be that difficult to create a group of members that are polled more frequently.

Does anyone know if FPL staff actually will see this message, or if there is somewhere else to leave it?

[laurent]

As a programmer, I immediately recognize that this system is built upside down. Polling accounts one by one, checking "Is there new voice mails?", and then send that yes/no to a user's ATA is a certain future failure. As customer base grows, the polling job become more and more complex until eventually the system on which it sits crumbles under the load.

The solution is obvious to system designers: the voicemail system should generate an event when a message is stored, saved, read or deleted. This event calls the notification system which pushes the yes/no to the ATA. This way, the sum of the work equals to the activity of the system at large, independent of its size. As the system grows, notification queues up and average wait time remains low, except for some rare, spike events where it gets longer.

There's probably technical limitations why they didn't do it this way. Could be the duct-taping of systems together that weren't supposed to work together, or lack of time/funds for development of something that doesn't translate to new customers as much as, say, "purchase long distance vouchers" for example.

One thing is certain*, is that it's only going to get worse. If it takes up to 10 minutes now for 45 000 clients, then we'll be at half an hour when it reaches 135 000 clients.

* It's only theories based on what I can see, maybe it's not like that at all.

PS. This is a programmers 2 cents.
PPS. Your mileage may vary.
PPPS. While supplies last.
PPPPS. I like turtles.

[mitwtim]

laurent, thanks for your analysis. Strangely enough as someone who is not a programmer, that is exactly what I came up with, too. It seems like a waste of resources to poll all 45000 every 10 minutes, when odds are 95% of them would have the same result as ten minutes ago. Who knows maybe that number is even higher.

But, given that the system is setup this way, doesn't it seem fairly simple to create an second query that would go through and accelerate the polling for a significantly smaller number of individuals?

Essentially FPL could then go and set the time limit for the remaining 45000 account to even a slightly longer time than the existing 10 minutes. Maybe most of those people don't use it at all, so it could even be increased even more significanlty. If server load is an issue then this would appear to save them a considerable amount of resources by only polling accounts that appreciate it.

I would propose that FPL create a group for people who value MWI and set it at 30 seconds.
And, if server load and resources are the issue move the 45000 to every 15 minutes. Surely that would decrease the overall load.

And if there is ever an opportunity to rebuid the way the MWI works altogether then implement laurent's idea.

Come on FPL please make this happen!

[FONGO_steve]

I'm just going to give a little technical clarification on how MWI and the voicemail system work. This is a pre-existing system already in use by many places, possibly even the places of employment of many of you if your workplace uses any form of digital PBX system in any degree.

The way the system works it that the voicemail box itself is a separate entity than the portion of the server that handles the MWI notification. When a voicemail is left in your voicemail box, exactly that happens, the voicemail is in your box. However, the nature of this system is such that the voicemail box must be polled by the MWI system for MWI to see that there is an update and send that update out to the user agent associated with that account.

We have approximately 45000 active users, and many more dormant ones, so this means that all those mailboxes have to be polled to check for updates to the MWI status. Due to the nature of being a free service, we likely have 40000+ more customers than any other VOIP provider - so it's easier for them to lower their polling frequency (as they likely use the same voicemail system). For us, we have to balance out this portion of the system to keep the load at a more reasonable rate.

We are always working on taking your concerns to heart and doing our absolute best to accommodate them. I have made note of this concern that some of you have and will bring it up with the right people. As always, we can never promise overnight changes, but if this is something we can work to implement in the voicemail system long-term, then we will certainly try our hardest.

[brentw]

Just thinking out loud....
Would it be possible to add a switch to enable or disable MWI per account.
-Then have an enable/disable MWI button on the Mailbox tab or somewhere when we login to freephoneline.ca, and/or add it as an option to turn on/off when you dial into voicemail *98.
-Any new users will be set to disabled by default, during the signup process make it very clear you go "here" to enable it.
-You could do a onetime disable for all existing users, giving lots of warning ahead of time that if you use it you need to go in and enable it, this would be painful but would flush out a lot of accounts that don't use it, especially the dormant ones.
-Could even do a big banner at the top of the main website page for a few weeks leading up to it.
-Or if you could somehow do a voicemail broadcast out to all users then they would get it when checking their normal voicemail if they use it (this would probably be quite difficult, but very effective, no one could argue that they didn't get warning about it...)

My "wild uneducated in the slightest guess" would be you could knock out MWI for half the users, maybe even 75%.
That would be quite significant load wise and could then decrease the time between MWI polling for people that actually use it.

Too bad that it couldn't be done the opposite to what it is now and have the voicemail server send a notification to the MWI system, it's sort of done already for sending out the email with the voicemail, those come through in seconds which is great, but not as useful as the actual MWI on the phones.

Just some thoughts.

Brent

[laurent]

Thanks for the details, Steve. So my theory was spot on. The system itself can't generate events so you have no choice but to poll it. How long until there's too many users for the polling to work at all? I think that this will need to be re-thinked before it breaks.

What about any of your other systems around the voicemail system? I assume that there's a system somewhere that know when a call is disconnected in order to log it somewhere. Perhaps that system could observe disconnections, and when a disconnect to voicemail happens for user 1234, send a event to the MWI poller to check account 1234?

As you can guess, I love stuff like that and would trade my current task of finding an eeprom memory write corruption bug with this interesting challenge

[qwerty]

Hi qwerty,

My guess would be unsolicited since it is the FPL server that sends out the info, we can't pull it from the server.
For fun if you plug the ATA directly into your modem does it happen to work?
Make sure you leave it for at least 10 minutes since the current update interval for MWI seems to be that long.

Brent, tried "unsolicited" but it did not work. Is there any help support out there able to help me?

[Jake]

I have to admit, this system sounds all very strange. And if this is how many systems out there work, there is a HUGE gap in the market for something better.

Why it does not 'POLL on demand' is a little mind boggling. Even if it was to simply put a flag against the accounts where activity has happened (new voice mail, or deleted voice mail) then just POLL those on it's run would make a lot more sense to me.

Any idea of the name of the somewhat backwards system?

Talking of backwards... for those that need to know when a message is left you could always go 'old fashioned' and buy a answer phone and make it pick up after 25 seconds.

On a side note, have you noticed how many people listen to the whole message, then just leave a 1 second silent message? It makes me think they are leaving it as long as they can just in case you 'pick up'