1A2 phone system

Empirephone(a)aol.com wrote: Maybe there should be a "Classic Communication" list. The short answer is no. 1A2 key phones have tip and ring of the outside lines connected directly to the phone, with the addition of 'A' leads for control and 'Lamp' leads to light the busy lamp. Once the line key is pressed, the phone operates much the same as a single-line phone. This is what allows the phones to be used when there is no power, because the rest of the key system really isn't needed for the phone to be used for placing a call. As long as the dial is connected, you can dial any number that the selected line is allowed to call. That's where the problem really exists. In order to provide restriction, you need to restrict specific lines either through telco provided restrictions, or through external devices that listen to the digits being dialed and disconnect the line if someone tries to make a call that is not allowed. External "toll restrictors" are not common anymore because the assumption that all toll calls start with the digit '1' is not always true and these devices were not always sophisticated enough to do the job. So, you could ask the telephone company to put toll restriction on your lines, except for a select few that are separate and not part of the inbound hunt group. The non-restricted lines would be made to appear only on the phones of people that need to make toll calls. The lines that are common to all the phones would be restricted. That was a common arrangement before the days of electronic key systems with sophisticated programming features. People even used to put key-switch locks on the phones that were wired to disable the dial so that someone couldn't make unauthorized calls if they had physical access to the phone. -- Doug Carman pdp11 at bellsouth dot net