land line phone

Dusty MI

Well-known Member
We have Verrison Home Connect for our in home phone service, which includes Voice Mail.
We use a pair of cordless phones with it, which have an answering machine within it.
We prefer the answering machine.
They both take messages. My question, How/what decides which one answers?

Dusty
 
The first one to pick up will be the one set for the lowest number of rings. I know you can select the number of rings on most answering machines, not sure about with voicemail. You might have to talk to your phone company about that. Or just get them to take it off your line or disable it, might save you a few bucks every month.
 
When I all my parent's house, if the phone-company/"voice-mail" picks up it means that they are on the phone or the electricity is out. If the answering machine picks up it means they didn't answer. They rarely think to check the voice-mail, since most calls go to the machine.
 
Simplistically the one that takes the message is the one that is set up to answer after the least time/number of rings. But it gets complicated fast.

Verizon like many carriers probably says they send calls to VM after 20 or 30 seconds, while your answering machine surely says 2, 4, or 6 rings. Hummm, how many seconds per ring? Don't cut it too close.

Next, if you have call waiting and decide not to answer a call that comes in while you are on the phone Verizon will conveniently send that second call to your Verizon VM.

Or if like me you don't have call waiting Verizon will send any call coming in to your number while it's busy straight to your Verizon VM. How nice of them.

Only real solution is tell Verizon to turn of the VM. If they will.

I've had to deal with this issue a lot over the past 3 years with several carriers. It's a PITA.
 

I should have added that right now most times the answering machine takes the calls when we are not there, but sometimes VM takes the call. Thats why I ask. We can't figure why, there does not seem to be a pattern as to which one answers.

Thanks,
Dusty
 
If the phone signal is iffy where you are, sometimes the call will go directly to voicemail with ZERO rings.

This is because it can't find your phone on the network.

I think you can disable voicemail.
 

On our land line we have voice mail plus we have answering machine. If we have a voice mail the land line phone has an led that blinks to tell you that you have a voice mail if you haven't previously deleted the blinking light. If you pick up the phone the dial tone has interrupted sound indicating you have a voice mail. Also if the power is out all unanswered calls go to voice mail.
 

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