[nagromme]

I thought all was well with my AlBook 1.25's V.92 modem and my call-waiting service. When dialed into the 'net, a message would pop up to notify my of phone calls. Great!

But after a few weeks I'm getting reports of people calling me and getting the endless rings... and I was never notified! This happens about half the time when I have a friend test it with me.

I can see for myself that notification is buggy if you have multiple users logged in (it sometimes notifies the background user--lot of good THAT does). So I don't use multiple logins at once anymore. But that's a separate issue. What's happening now is the notifcation never appears AT ALL. But only SOMETIMES. Sometimes it works fine.

Do other people have call notification working 100% of the time? Is this a problem with Panther, or something I can fix? Should I mess with my PowerBook or blame my ISP?

Thanks!

[TheIceMan]

I don't think it works. I missed a call yesterday and there was no message to notify me. Too bad because I was so excited when I saw that option.

[vcutag]

Originally posted by nagromme:
I thought all was well with my AlBook 1.25's V.92 modem and my call-waiting service. When dialed into the 'net, a message would pop up to notify my of phone calls. Great!

But after a few weeks I'm getting reports of people calling me and getting the endless rings... and I was never notified! This happens about half the time when I have a friend test it with me.

I can see for myself that notification is buggy if you have multiple users logged in (it sometimes notifies the background user--lot of good THAT does). So I don't use multiple logins at once anymore. But that's a separate issue. What's happening now is the notifcation never appears AT ALL. But only SOMETIMES. Sometimes it works fine.

Do other people have call notification working 100% of the time? Is this a problem with Panther, or something I can fix? Should I mess with my PowerBook or blame my ISP?

Thanks!

Yeah, I had no luck with it either. I think maybe you might have to have something special like call-waiting or something... I'm not sure, and I couldn't find any information about it, so I just stuck it out until we got broadband.

[nagromme]

Correct, you DO have to have call waiting from your phone company (and if you have caller ID too, the name pops up onscreen).

And your ISP must support a V.92 modem feature called "modem-on-hold". Most ISPs seem to by now. (If yours doesn't, maybe you still can take calls while online--I'm not sure--but your Internet will be interrupted. Modem-on-hold means that for 3 minutes, your connection will stay "paused" so you can resume your downloads painlessly after a brief conversation. If you talk longer, the modem disconnects and you just dial in again later.)

This is very cool and it DOES work for me. If you have a V.92 modem (recent Macs do) and call waiting, try it!

The thing is, it only works sometimes. One call will give me on-screen notification... the next will not.

I'm guessing the problem is my PowerBook or Panther... but could it be my ISP somehow blocking calls?

Which is why I'd like to know if ANYONE gets call notifications reliably. If so, I'll change ISPs and test some more.

If not, then maybe this OS X feature just doesn't work yet (a shame since it was an incentive to get a new Mac--AND I've paid for call waiting). Or maybe my PowerBook needs repair.