asterisk users - Jul 2005 - ATXFER discussion, what's your opinion ?

Hi,

I'm experimenting attended calls tranfers and I'm a little bit
confused.

In usual pbx's normaly there is no difference between an attended call
transfer and a blind one:

you just hit "transfer" then dial the extension you want the call to
be transfered.

If you stay on the phone you can talk to the other party, then, when you
hangup, he will get the call.

If you hang immediately after the transfer sequence the call is just transfered,
and if the other party is busy or does not answer the transfered call
is bounced back to you again.

That's how pbx's users are expecting call transfer to work, is there a
way to reproduce this behavior in asterisk ?

For what I can see it's not possible and you will have to select two
codes, one for blind and one for attended tranfers ....

What do you think about it ?


-- 
Best regards,
 Alessio                          mailto:afoc@interconnessioni.it

Alessio Focardi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm experimenting attended calls tranfers and I'm a little bit
> confused.
> 
<SNIP>

I honestly think that transfers is one thing that Asterisk should 
improve a LOT to be able to stand up to even the most cheapo taiwanese 
no-name PBXs, which support attended transfers out of the box.

I've had two possible clients refuse an Asterisk installation because 
attended transfers were unreliable. I honestly didn't know how to 
explain that a feature available in PBXs for decades was not available 
or didn't always work. I don't know how the current HEAD is going, but 
so far, attended transfers weren't available in stable.

Regards,

Mike

> > That's exactly my opinion: isn't ironic that the only function
"joe
> > sixpack" will use in a pbx is the worst implemented ?
 
> Maybe because most asterisk PBX's are implemented using business class
> softphones rather than analogue phones? Most business class SIP phones
> (and even grandstream phones) allow attended/non-attended transfers with
> asterisk-stable and/or asterisk-head...
I think that's mostly right, but it should also be a "native" xfer
function working the same way regarding of the user agent, some sort of common
ground we can "trust"  for installation with mixed devices.

By the way: anyone got experience in attended trasfer with snom ? :)

Alessio Focardi