CHANUNAVAILABLE

CHANUNAVAILABLE — short for "channel unavailable" — is the reason VICIdial records when it tried to place a call but couldn't even get a line to dial out on. A "channel" here is one slot of capacity for a single call. If no channel is available, the call never leaves the building.

It shows up as a hang-up cause on a call's record and rolls into your call status reporting. A handful of these now and then is normal. A flood of them across a campaign means something is broken, and your agents will be sitting idle while the dialer fails to connect anyone — so it's worth catching fast.

Common causes

• Your trunk to the carrier is down or misconfigured.
• Your carrier is rejecting or refusing the calls.
• You've hit a channel limit and run out of capacity to dial more at once.

It's a close relative of congestion, but the two differ in feel: congestion usually means the network was busy mid-attempt, while CHANUNAVAILABLE often means you never got out the door at all. Both point at the sip connection to your provider.

Start there when you're chasing it: check the trunk is registered and your carrier sees your traffic, then place a test call yourself. If a single number gives this once it might just be a fluke, but a steady stream of it almost always means the path to your carrier is broken or your account has run into a limit — and that's a phone call to your provider, not a setting to tweak in VICIdial.

It's worth setting up a simple alert so you hear about a spike of these before your agents do. Idle agents are expensive, and the first sign of trouble is often a quiet floor rather than an error on a screen. If you ever see this jump right after a change — a new carrier, a new dialing prefix, more agents added at once — start by undoing that change, because a sudden wall of channel failures rarely appears on its own without something having moved.