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A busy signal (or busy tone or engaged tone) in telephony is an audible call-progress tone or audible signal to the calling party that indicates failure to complete the requested connection of that particular telephone call. The busy signal has become less common in the past few decades due to the prevalence of call waiting and voicemail.
In many cases, when calling from abroad, busy, reorder and other call failure tones may be played by the local switch. Modern signalling protocols like SS7 send this information digitally; thus only a ringback tone or announcement generated by a distant switch in a foreign network will ever be heard by callers from other countries or networks.
For most of the 20th century, calls were usually placed on the public switched telephone network via electromechanical switching equipment. When a caller dialed a number that was busy or permanently unavailable, the central office of their carrier would shunt the incoming call to a circuit on which the busy signal tone was produced. These busy ...
In some instances the Number Unobtainable Tone may be used instead. This is a continuous, uninterrupted 400 Hz tone. The signal is used to indicate that the destination is unreachable, either because all circuits (trunks) are busy, the called number is out of service, the call is unroutable, or sometimes that an invalid code has been dialed. [1]
A disconnect tone in telephony is a tone provided to the remaining party to a call after the remote party hangs up. [1] [2] Typically, the disconnect tone is a few cycles of the reorder, busy, or the off-hook tone (e.g. in US), or between five and fifteen seconds of the Number Unobtainable tone (e.g. in UK).
If the called station is already busy and cannot accept a second call via call waiting, the calling party is alerted with a busy signal. When the call routing is successful and the receiving telephone is not already in a call, the destination telephone receives an electrical signal, called power ringing, or the ring tone, to alert the recipient ...
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Busy override is a function of the private branch exchange that allows the calling party to override the busy signal on the called party to break into the ongoing conversation. Before breaking in most PBX announce the incoming call by a distinctive sound signal or tone , but in most cases this can be disabled by software.