HELLO & WELCOME

[WelshPaul]

I have been a Voipfone customer since way back in 2006, I have always been a happy customer. One thing that has always bugged me is that Voipfone's Busy Lamp Field (BLF) feature has only ever worked with Snom Phones... Well until lately!

For those of you who do not know what BLF is...
Busy Lamps is for use with extensions on our PBX and means that - if you have a phone that supports it which at the moment that means all snom phones - you can see which extensions are busy, which are ringing and which are free.

This is obviously a very useful function for receptionists – they can see who’s available before transferring a call. But it is also useful for everyone, especially in a distributed business with extensions in different physical locations; at home or even in different countries; it works wherever the telephones are located. You can see whether an extension is available before you call it.

A useful side effect of this feature is that you can now simply press the key next to the extension number and it will dial the number for you directly.

Great, if you can get it to work. It turns the NOTIFY message sent from the Voipfone PBX doesn't have the “Subscription-State” header.

According to RFC 3265, Section 3.2.4. Subscriber NOTIFY Behaviour

• NOTIFY requests MUST contain "Subscription-State" headers
  which indicate the status of the subscription.

The snom phones are more relaxed (as are Gigaset ones) in that area and as such, work.

I contacted Voipfone and pointed this out to them and I am happy to say that this was the response I received:

You're right we don’t send a Subscription-State header if we send a NOTIFY for dialog-info and we should this has now been corrected and is going through change control and will be rolled across the network next week.

WooHoo - Finally Voipfone's Busy Lamp Field (BLF) should work with Cisco, Linksys and OBIHAI phones as well as their Snom and gigaset range.

[c0d3r]

This is very interesting - Thanks for posting and letting us know.

[c0d3r]

Well to date busy lamps still doesn't work on Cisco phones! I take it they have not implemented the fix above?

[WelshPaul]

Hi C0d3r,

Sadly no they haven't implemented this on their network yet.

This is very disappointing and I'm not sure what is even preventing them from doing so.

[westmixxin]

There is a lot of things that need to be implemented on the network that have not been put into play but over time they'll make adjustments and increase the quality I definitely have faith in them.