Call Forwarding Difficulties

[SunOfBeach]

This isn't quite "computer" tech help... but it's close, and I'm desperate.

I've been forwarding the calls from my main business line to a colleague for over a month now. About once/week, someone emails us in a hissyfit over not being able to get through. We get frequent messages like "it went to a busy signal immediately", or "I heard a message that it was disconnected", or various other/similar things.

We've talked to our phone company 9276 times, and they insist that the problem can't be on our end.

My colleague has done the same with his phone company, and keeps getting the same runaround.

We do have call waiting, and 90%+ of the time I believe the phones work fine. But I keep getting these occasional "are you still in business? your phone doesn't work" emails, and I just can't believe that between me and him we cannot get the phone to work properly/constantly.

The only suggestion our phone company ever gave us was to try 'call forwarding busy', but that's for something totally different, and not what we need. Only needed www.google.com to figure that out...

Last bit of info - it 'may' be happening mostly when the caller is in the home state of the colleague I'm forwarding the calls too (at least the last 2 times, the person was from Pennsylvania, which is where he is). This could be low-N coincidence too, of course.

Does anyone have any idea as to what could be going wrong? This is driving me crazy...

PC

[nuclear500]

Who is doing the forwarding? The phone company or the phone at your desk?

[SunOfBeach]

We forward it ourselves by doing *72 and then the number. Are you saying that perhaps if we do it via the company that it may work?

[nuclear500]

Perhaps the phone itself is behaving screwy, or the phone companies handling of the reroute behavior.

If the phone company does it, it will be handled before it even attempts to get to your end. Think of it like an Internet packet being sent down one router, hits another router that then says "nope, send this packet here" and it sends it back to the router it got it from and then proceeds to its destination. The phone company doing it takes out of the picture the second router.

I'd find out what implications it has in terms of the phone still working for outgoing calls, but if that is not important and it a forward.

I guess I'm thinking along the lines of the fact you do not have your own telecommunications equipment and the phones are analog - IE directly connected to the telephone switching network.

[SunOfBeach]

Wow... this is just the kind of answer I was hoping/dreaming for when I posted. Thankyou very much for the time you spent on this.