Advanced, HowTo
Finally, an elegant way to get a Distinctive Ring on the Aastra 9133i
Sometimes it’s important for phone to ring differently. Maybe you want your “work” number to sound different than your “home” number. Maybe two people share a phone and you don’t want people answering calls that aren’t for them.
To get distinctive rings on the Aastra 9133i, I had to use multiple lines. The phone supports up to 9 lines, but still it required having to create a SIP account for each line, and the phone had to register each of these lines. It worked, but it wasn’t particularly elegant.
From a post at TrixBox forums I learned of a page on voip-info that explains how to get distinctive rings. (They call it “Priority Alerting”.) All that needed was the addition of an Alert-Info header using the SipAddHeader command.
exten => 3,1,Noop(Call Bob) exten => 3,n,Dial(SIP/aastra1,20) exten => 4,1,Noop(Call Joe) exten => 4,n,SIPAddHeader(Alert-Info: info=<Bellcore-dr3>) ; distinctive ring! exten => 4,n,Dial(SIP/aastra1,20)
In this example, if sometime dials 3 to get Bob, the phone rings as normal. If they dial 4 to get Joe, the phone now has a noticably different ring.
The variables seem to change the timing of the ring tone, as opposed to the tone itself, so you still don’t have total control over the ringtone. The possible values for the info variable are:
<Bellcore-dr1> <Bellcore-dr2> <Bellcore-dr3> <Bellcore-dr4> <Bellcore-dr5>
If the Aastra people are listening, it would be amazing if the Alert-Info command was able to select different ring tones.
Is one of them a silent ring?
No, a silent ring would be neat, but all are slight variations on the standard ring.