Well, no mystery at all. I did some additional testing and finally realized why my setup was not working.
- The HANGUP TIMEOUT starts counting once the auto attendant picks up the call / there is a delay of +4 seconds towards the set number of seconds.
- The REDIRECT NUMBER/TIMEOUT does not start counting until a personal welcome message has been played.
The latter caused me to set bad timeout values, because I set my counting to start with the auto attendant's pickup.
> Solution:
- Standard announcement only: REDIRECT/TIMEOUT will be triggered after the set value.
- Personal announcement: REDIRECT/TIMEOUT will not be triggered during the personal announcement. This timeout will only be triggered after the personal announcement, once the standard recordings picks up ("..pls enter your parties extension..").
> Suggestion:
This behaviour makes sense in a standard environment. In our setup the personal announcement was repeated three times (one long soundfile), so callers could listen to the announcement of our extensions multiple times. Therefore the pbx was never able to redirect automatically, because the standard announcement did not come up. I would like to suggest to make the REDIRECT TIMEOUT independent of the announcement types and programming of the auto attendant would be more flexible.