Using dial phone on VOIP

[tallguy58]

I sold a 302 to a co-worker and he now wants to use it on a VOIP system at his place in Florida.

What, if anything does he need to make it work?

[Phonesrfun]

It all depends on the service he is on, and whether that VoIP system and the ATA support rotary dialing or not.  Some do; some don't.  The easiest way to tell is to plug the phone in and see if it breaks dial tone or not.

If the voip ATA supports rotary dialing, he should be good to go with nothing needed to be done.

If it doesn't support rotary dialing, then he will have to either use another phone for dialing or get something that will create DTMF tones.  Optons are:

Buy a pulse to tone converter
Wire a DTMF (Touch-tone) separate dialing pad as an adjunct device next to the phone
Get a hybrid-type small office PBX system like a Panasonic 308 or 616
Several years ago, Radio Shack and others sold a hand-held device about the size of a cell phone that you could hold up to the transmitter of the phone.  The device has a touch tone pad on it and a speaker that plays the touch tone tones as you key them in.  So you hold the device up to the phone you are on and send the tones through the transmitter.

No other ways that I know of.

[tallguy58]

Thanks Bill

Any suggestions on a good PTT converter for a reasonable price?

[Phonesrfun]

Someone else might have information.  I don't know much about these because I don't need one (yet), since my VoIP provider currently supports rotary phones.  Besides, I have a small PBX that converts the rotary pulses to tones.

In reading the subject on these converters, I have heard totally mixed reviews and one of the manufacturers apparently ceased selling them for a while and then started again. 

You might want to check oldphoneworks.com and see what they have, and I seem to remember a product called dialgizmo.

[dsk]

I have 4 dialgizmo's , 2 from before trouble started, and 2 from after the new start up, one of the last does not work, and they do not answer on my email.  But the working ones are really good. 

Another more complicated solution may be a programmable smart1 from mitel. These are not 100 % programmable, and may cause some frustration, still it is the best I could find getting my 1946 PAX hooked up to my ATA.

[Charles]

I am using one of the new Dial Gizmos. It is working fine on my ATT Uverse VOIP.

[Lewes2]

Just received our new Dial Gizmo yesterday and installed it just down stream of the Vonage router which is connected to the Comcast cable modem. The four rotary phones dial out perfectly.

Chuck