"Cut-off" or "Dead Air" Message FAQ
Updated 2/2/2007Question: During a regular message, my voice mail message abruptly ends.
Answer: We've spent many hours researching our voicemail system to see if it is responsible for cut-off messages. We have never documented a cut-off message that was caused by the voicemail system itself. There are three main causes for cut-off messages. All of these causes are external to our voice mail system, having to do with the user's equipment or environment, or with the local telephone company.
First, line noise: Line noise can cause the voicemail system to think it is hearing touch tones, thus disrupting recording and listening. At Centratel, the phone circuits connected to the voicemail system are all digital. Digital phone lines are not affected by line noise. If line noise is the reason for your cut-off messages, the line noise is generated from analog circuits on either the user’s or the caller’s side of the network. We recommend that you contact your local phone provider. They can test and diagnose to see if your lines have noise. Often it may not be the main phone lines but the line taps throughout the community in which you live. They regulate line quality, volume, and are the switching locations for immediate, local area phone service. Sometimes the connections in these boxes go bad. Often the telephone company does not know about a bad line tap until customers have complained about line noise. Your telephone company representatives might also argue that it’s not their system, it’s our voicemail system. However, as mentioned above, we have never documented a cut-off message and our local lines are all digital.
Second: background noise. If background noise is causing your cut-off messages, find a quiet place where you can concentrate on listening/sending your messages. Avoid having music, construction, televisions, children, or other noise in the background as this may cause an irregular response from your voicemail. High pitched noise often sounds like a telephone touch-tone, which can cause the voicemail to respond as if keys were being pressed on the phone. Office environments may have fax systems or modems dialing out: sometimes, when they’re dialing out, these devices send out audible telephone tones that confuse our voice mail system. If another person in the office is checking their voicemail, their phone may pick up a tone from the devices and then react. Note that if the sender of the message had background noise while recording their message, the noise can be imbedded in the message and our system can react to the noise as the message is being played, as if it were a touch tone.
Third: Cell phones, speaker phones and cordless phones. Cell phones can have noise interference because of poor signal and coverage area. Even digital cell phones are prone to losing signal. If you are listening or sending a voicemail from a cell phone, messages may be cut-off because of this. Try listening or sending voicemail from a different phone.
Background noise is greatly amplified by a speaker phone. Because speaker phones are designed for two-way communication in an open room, small noises in the background can cause the voicemail to react. Avoid recording your voicemail message over a speaker phone unless there is a completely quiet environment.
Cordless phones are notorious for creating background noise. There are many manufacturers and models. All vary in quality of sound reproduction. This is complicated by the distance from the user to the base unit and even further complicated with any local background noise not associated with the phone itself.
Question: I get a message and it’s only dead air, is it cut-off?
Answer: The voicemail system hears anything and everything when it is recording. So, if a message is being recorded with no one talking, the mailbox user will only hear dead air. This is not a cut-off message. Sometimes people call a voicemail box and then change their mind about leaving a message after it has begun recording. Our voicemail system has a three second wait period when it is listening to silence from the caller’s end before it saves the message. In other words, if your caller calls your mailbox and then pauses for over three seconds in message-taking mode, the voicemail system will think the caller left a short message and will record the dead air as if it were a message.
Question: Why are only my longest messages cut-off?
Answer: All voicemail boxes are given a message duration time. This time ranges from 4 to 10 minutes depending on the mailbox service package that was purchased. If a message is recorded for longer than the message duration time, the message will cut-off when that limit is reached (note that when the message is cut-off, the individual recording the message will hear a prompt from the voicemail system stating that the recording process is ended: they will have to call again to finish their message). If you notice you are having cut-offs only when receiving long messages, call us and we will increase your message recording time.
Question: How does the Centratel customer care department diagnose cut-off complaints?
Answer: If you call our customer service department to tell us you have a cut-off message, our first step is to log into your mailbox to listen to the message. If we can play the complete message from our location, we know that the voicemail system did it’s job of recording the message properly. We do not have any special connections to the voicemail system which allow us to hear a message in a different way than our customers. We use the voicemail system exactly the way our customer’s use the system. So, in our testing, if we hear the entire message, we know the cut-off is for one of the above mentioned reasons. If this is the case, Centratel can't fix any of these problems because they are simply out of our control.
