do not disturb and busy tone

This is in my opinion a very poor design.

Especially think of "repeated calls" setting.

Basically most of the people I know are used to get waiting signal, answering machine or an answer.

Now you call a iPhone user who has "do not disturb" on, with the setting "repeated calls on". You dial, hear "user busy" signal and think "well that didn't go through" and call again. And then you disturb the answerer because the 2nd attempt does not only go through but also rings normally on answerer's side.

I personally keep the repeated calls setting on for any cases of emergency. If it would work as I think it should: giving normal ring tone for caller and silent operation on receiver, the caller would not call again:

A) because receiver will see a missed call and call back

B) they don't have an emergency.

Now I would dare to say 80% redials because of the busy tone which you should not really nowadays get as I describe above.

How could we influence Apple to change the caller's tone to normal ringing, instead of "user busy"?

Are you using a supported carrier? If you choose to use an unsupported carrier, some features may not work. It sounds like DND is one of those features in your case.

Well, the iPhone is from my work, a lease phone from a major operator (Elisa) in Finland so I would guess that's not the problem.

We did a peer test too, with my mother's phone, also using second major carrier (Sonera) in Finland. Same result.

These two providers both sell iPhone in Finland.

Looking at other posts in the internet I think many people complain about "user busy" with "do not disturb" mode. Actually one post suggested switching "do not disturb" off when the problem was that callers got "user busy" from calling him/her.

I think this is as designed, but might be wrong. In this case what could I do to fix it?

Sounds to me like the problem is your carrier. I don't recall having seen this issue reported here before. I don't see every post, by any means, but I'm here enough that I think I would have noticed it if it was a widespread problem. I would definitely take it up with your carrier again and have the issue escalated. It may be a provisioning problem specifically on the line(s) experiencing the issue. If DND is on, the phone simply rejects the call as if you had double tapped the home button on the first ring.

Hmm. iOS 7.1.1 double tapping home button does not do anything, whether the phone is locked or not. Well that's not the point.

If phone is unlocked, and i tap in red "do not answer" button, the receiver get's the "user busy" reply as for the "rejected call".

Isn't this exactly the problem what I described above; rejecting call is not, in my opinion, the correct way to respond in "do not disturb". For many reasons which I littlebit opened in the post above.

Or is there in other countries two separate "user busy" and "call rejected" tones for the caller?

Sorry. Meant the power button.

Do you not have call waiting on your line? Granted, I don't expect every carrier around the world to work the same, and my personal experience is largely limited to US carriers, but over here, rejecting a call does not result in the caller getting anything other than being shunted off directy to voice mail. There is pretty much no such thing as a busy signal on cell phones here. Land lines, yes. Cell lines, no. If a call is rejected by the recipient, it goes straight to voice mail. If the called party simply never answers, it drops to voice mail after a pre-set amount of time. If the phone is turned off, calls will go straight to voice mail.

The OP was talking about the Do Not Disturb function, not the do not answer button.

I'm aware of that. But DND, when active, rejects calls in exactly the same way that double tapping the power button does. From the sound of it, doing that, or choosing to reject it on screen if the phone is unlocked, causes the same problem. It should be going to voice mail, but it's not.

That would seem to be a problem on the carrier side.

That's nice but my response was to daBowmore who referred to the Home button and the red Do Not Answer button. Any do not answer button will do exactly that, not answer the call. I agree with you that both are having carrier issues.

The problem is that Apple has decided to hard code into the iPhone the way DND handles incoming calls and do so according to US standards. A special code is sent to the carrier and this code causes a busy tone at the caller end in most european and many other countries around the world.

It would have been nice if Apple had implemented a way to adapt to local standards outside the US. As it is now to me the feature is pretty useless. Because as mentioned above when people hear the busy signal they will keep on calling but in vain. Resulting in very annoyed and frustrated callers. That is not what you want with your business customers, family and friends.

anilsen wrote:

It would have been nice if Apple had implemented a way to adapt to local standards outside the US. As it is now to me the feature is pretty useless. Because as mentioned above when people hear the busy signal they will keep on calling but in vain. Resulting in very annoyed and frustrated callers. That is not what you want with your business customers, family and friends.

It's not a question of U.S. standards. If you use the phone on a carrier that officially supports the iPhone, you shouldn't have a problem even outside of the U.S..

Like Anilsen wrote it is an Apple problem. In all major carriers in EU that officially support iPhone the DND feature has the same effect, a busy tone. This makes this feature completely useless. This problem exists since the first time this feature was presented and until now it is not fixed.

iPhone 6 - 64gb - iOS 8.3

Same problem on Ios 8 and Swedish operator Tele2. Just got the tip from Tele2 support to turn off DND which fixed the problem with busy tone on every (first) call.