Enterphone: changing the phone number your suite dials

Mircom is one name you see over and over in Canadian lobbies. Enterphone is the other. If your panel is not a Mircom, there is a good chance it says Enterphone.

Enterphone is a Viscount brand, built in Burnaby and going into Canadian buildings since the 1960s. It is sold under the Hirsch name today. None of that changes what is bolted to your lobby wall. A panel installed in 1999 is still there and still working, which is the problem when you want your own number on it.

How do you know your building has an Enterphone?

• The faceplate says so. Enterphone is printed on most of them, sometimes with Viscount underneath.
• A narrow stainless panel with a small two or four line display. That is the Elektra family, common in 1990s and 2000s buildings.
• A large colour touchscreen in a newer lobby. That is Enterphone MESH or iQ.
• Oversized keypad buttons and a paper directory behind glass. That is the Classic or Slimline, the older no phone bill panels.

The model matters less than one question. Does the panel place a real outside telephone call, or ring a handset inside your suite over building wiring? That difference decides everything below.

What does an Enterphone store for your suite?

On a dial-out Enterphone, your suite is one entry in a directory. The fields are the ones any dialler has.

Enterphone quotes capacity figures that are easy to misread. Elektra models are specified for up to 2,000 telephone numbers. The Axess panel is quoted at 1,000 users with a 150 name directory. Those are counts of suites, each holding one number. There is no second slot for your apartment. Why every panel works this way.

Who can change the number on an Enterphone?

Not you. The directory sits behind an administrator login, and there is no resident page where you type in a new mobile number.

On Enterphone MESH, the administrator opens the panel in a web browser, goes to the Suites tab, and edits the entry. Five minutes for a manager who has the login. An older Elektra or Axess is programmed at the keypad or remotely by modem, which usually means booking the security contractor and waiting a week or two.

1. Email whoever holds the panel login Property manager in a rental, concierge or the board in a condo. Give your suite number and the new phone number in full with the area code.
2. Ask them to fix the display name in the same message It is a separate field on the same suite entry, and it is often still the tenant before you.
3. Ask which key opens the door It is configurable per building on every Enterphone model. Find out before a visitor is standing there.
4. Test it from the lobby yourself Buzz your own suite, answer, and open the door once. A number that rings but will not release the lock is half a job.

Can an Enterphone ring two phones at once?

No. The suite entry holds one telephone number and the panel dials it. Where a building offers a second number at all, it is a rollover: it only rings after the first number has rung out, typically 20 to 30 seconds later. By then the courier has tried the next unit or left. How rollover differs from ringing both phones.

Newer MESH installs blur this slightly. If the building runs the Enterphone mobile app, the panel tries the resident app first over the internet, and the suite phone number is the fallback it dials when that call fails. The administrator enrols the app, not you. Underneath it, there is still one regular phone number for your suite.

If you live alone and the panel is simply calling a number you no longer use, you do not need to buy anything. Email the manager, get the field updated, test it, done. That is free and it is the right answer for you. How to check what it currently calls.

What actually gets more than one phone ringing?

The panel places an ordinary phone call and cannot tell what happens after it leaves the building. So the fix is never at the panel. It is in what the number on file does next.

BuzzMeBro gives your apartment its own local phone number. You hand that number to the building once, they type it into the suite entry like any other number, and a buzz then rings every phone registered to the apartment at the same time. Whoever picks up can open the door. A buzz arrives as an ordinary inbound phone call, so there is nothing to install to receive one. Setup happens once on the website. It is $11.99 a month or $109.00 a year, billed per apartment rather than per person. Check availability for your building.

Two honest limits. A local number is checked at signup, and a building with no number available goes on a waitlist. And if your Enterphone is the hardwired kind described below, no outside number helps at all.

Google Voice: free, but the door key usually does not survive

A door opens because a DTMF audio tone travels back down the call to the panel. Google Voice re-encodes call audio, and the tone often arrives too distorted for the panel to recognise. In the lobby that looks like this: your phone rings, you hear the courier, you press the key, nothing happens. You are talking to someone outside a locked door. The longer version.

What if your Enterphone never dials out at all?

This is the part most articles skip, and it is why a lot of Enterphone requests get refused. Ask before you plan around it.

Enterphone built its name on the no phone bill system. The Enterphone 2000 family, the Classic and Slimline panels, and Enterphone X all tie into the building’s own internal telephone wiring. A visitor enters your suite code, the panel signals a control unit in the phone room, and that unit rings a handset inside your apartment over building wire. No call ever reaches Bell or Rogers.

On that system there is no telephone number stored for your suite, so there is nothing to change and no service can help. Your options are a phone plugged into the building jack, or asking the building to upgrade the panel. If a building says your buzzer cannot call a mobile, this is usually why, and they are telling the truth. How to tell which kind you have.

Which key opens the door on an Enterphone?

It varies, and assuming 9 is how people end up locked out of their own conversation. Enterphone MESH ships with 6 opening the first door relay and 8 opening the second, both changeable in the panel settings. Plenty of Toronto condos with Enterphone systems tell residents to press 9, because someone configured it that way.

Ask, then test. If the right key does nothing, the problem is usually the audio path rather than the panel. Why the door digit fails.

If your panel turns out to be a Mircom rather than an Enterphone, the answer is close but the field names differ. The Mircom TX3 version, and how apartment buzzers work for the general shape of it.