MOH off but still beeps every 10 seconds

[lukeprimm]

Our cliets complained about the MOH music so we deleted it and now they are complaining that it beeps every 10 seconds.  Is there a way to have silence when put on hold(I dislike this but its not my call)?  Thanks

[Rob Huffman · Accepted solution]

Hi Luke,

This is a pretty common request, I don't know why as I always find it

quite annoying to be on Hold with just silence as you never know if the

person at the other end just cut you off But here we go;

How do I disable music on hold (MOH)/play silence for MOH?

CUCM does not have a native option to disable MOH or select tone on hold as an option.  CSCdw68639 is an enhancement defect filed to track a related feature and if you feel strongly that this feature is required for your deploment please contact your account team who can put you in touch with the appropriate Product Manager.

That said there are several options available to get the desired behaivor.

1. Upload a 60 second recording of silence to use an MOH audio source.   
   • This is by far the simplest way to have callers hear no MOH.  The downsides are that it still requires an MOH resource, the file has to be uploaded to all MOH servers, and if you use a very short duration audio file you can cause CPU spikes on the MOH server.
2. Use multicast MOH but prevent the multicast stream from reaching the endpoints.   
   • This method requires configuring an MOH audio source, MOH server, and media resource group (MRG) for multicast MOH.  This will save MOH server resources throughout the cluster as one software resource is used for every device on hold.  Blocking the multicast traffic can be done by setting a very low TTL for the audio source (Max Hops field on the MOH server configuration page) or via ACL on an appropriate router in the network.  The device on hold will be told to listen for the multicast audio stream but because it never receives the RTP packets the held party will only hear silence.
3. Block access to an MOH server via media resource group list and set the parameters to disable tone on hold.   
   • This final option is the one that comes closest to selecting silence out of the box.  It does require different configuration based on device type.
   • MGCP gateways must be configured with the command mgcp timer toh-time 65500.
   • SCCP phones and gateways are controlled by the Cisco CallManager Service Parameter Tone on Hold Timer.  A value of 0 means a single tone will be played.  A value of 20000 means no tones will be played.
   • 6608 voice gateways are controlled by the Hold Tone Silence Duration value in the gateway configuration page.  This timer determines the length of time between beeps and is in ms (1000 = 1s).  Values can be between 0 and 65535 where 0 indicates the default 10s timer will be used. 

From;

https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-13450

Cheers!

Rob