What the status means
The call reached the number and the line was in use. Nothing was transmitted, so no pages of your plan were used. faxB2B records the reason as a busy line and schedules another call rather than asking you to do anything.
How the redialling works
By default a fax gets up to three calls in total, with pauses of two and five minutes before the retries. Each attempt appears on the fax record, so you can see how many have happened. An owner can set one to five calls in Settings and change each pause, from one minute up to an hour.
If every attempt is busy
- Wait until all the scheduled calls have finished — the fax is still working.
- Send again later in the day. Shared machines have quiet periods, often early morning.
- Split a long document. A twenty-page fax occupies the line long enough to collide with other senders.
- Ask the recipient whether they have a second fax number, or whether the machine is out of paper and refusing calls.
When a busy tone is not really busy
A machine that is jammed, out of paper or switched off can present as busy or as unreachable, depending on the equipment in between. If a number is busy at every hour across two days, it is worth a phone call to the recipient rather than more faxes. Line faults sometimes look the same.
Reduce the collisions
- Do not resend manually while retries are pending. Two copies of your fax competing for one line makes the problem worse.
- Space out a batch. Ten recipients are fine, but ten faxes to the same office are not.
- Lengthen the pauses in Settings if the destination is a busy single-line office.