Home > Consumer Reviews > AT&T 964 Corded Expandable 4-Line Intercom Speakerphone with Digital Answering System (Graphite)

We bought 3 of these phones and tried out 3 more... they came from 3 separate locations. All 6 had the same problems!!

Minor problem: Intercom never worked.

Minor problem: Set-up is difficult to scroll through. You have to go through many options to find the one you want, because of poor organization & layout.

MAJOR problem: This is why we returned the phones. When you receive an incoming call on any line, if either Auto Attend or DTAD picks up to either transfer call or take a message, whatever happens from hereon out, when the caller hangs up, the 964 phone will continue to HOLD THE LINE for approx. 3 minutes while the phone company comes on with their automated message of "If you'd like to make a call please hang up and dial again." followed by a loud off-the-hook beep-beep-beeping. Finally, the line will be released. This also happens if you're talking on one line and someone calls trying to leave a message on another line. You can hear the other phone being "off the hook" so to speak and it is irritating beyond description. This has been thoroughly researched and tested on our end and it ahs nothing to do with our line, the region we're in, or other phones on the system. We eliminated everything and the problem persisted! We went through dozens of calls to Lucient to get help and Customer Service was unknowledgable and unwilling to give more than surface assistance. Research Team was very thorough and tried a lot, but they were unsuccessful at solving the problem. To complicate the problem a little further, after a couple of weeks with that problem, the line-holding suddenly became sporadic. That couldn't be eliminated to why it did/didn't work... The best answer we got was that, "These are very new phones and we don't have everything smoothed out yet."

My advise from much painful experience is to NOT BUY these phones, unless you relish the development of your patience through coping with numerous problems on your own.

Phones are an integral part of most businesses, specially service ones. This system is grossly misrepresented in their marketing. AT&T has put out an embarassing piece of garbage for a leading phone company.

People cannot leave you messages while you're on the phone. People cannot hear your messages because the quality of sound is either too low or too muzzled. Many features don't work well as advertised.

We needed 4 phones. We returned them and purchased a Voice Logic Voice Pro 412 system. This little system is awesome and, best of all, it works.

Whatever you buy, stay away from the 964!!!

To echo everyone else's comments, I've had the same problems with this phone, which I foolishly bought when it first came out upon the advice of an office supply store salesman. (Ughhhh!!!!!)

Sometimes the connection sounds clear; othertimes, even a local call can sound like the other person is calling from the moon.

The answering machine is absolutely dreadful. You can barely hear the messages when dialing in remotely, and even when you're standing in front of the thing, the speech is so highly compressed that it's often garbled beyond recognition.

There are lots of other smaller but very annoying quirks already mentioned. This phone is obviously a product that never made it past the alpha development phase and somehow mistakenly was released to the public for further testing...

I have had this phone for about 9 months. Programming the phones is very difficult. In order to get help from customer support I had to use a cell phone. Most recently all I got was a recording telling me my call was being transferred - for 17 minutes, but it never was transferred. I used the cell phone because in order to get help with programming the phones, you cannot be using the phones - they do only one thing at a time. I have found that if you are on one line and the other rings, the answering system will not pick up the call. The only time I get messages is if the phone is not being used at all. My intent was that if I was on one line and the other rang, that the answering function would pick it up. I bought 2 phones to ensure this would work but after 9 months it is worse than ever. Good luck.

I bought this to be a stand-alone phone for a home office. Although this phone seemed packed with features, there were a several things that detract. 1) If you're on one line the answering machine will not answer if another call comes in. 2) The answering machine can not be selectively turned on or off for individual lines. 3) Poor sound quality on the recordings as well as VERY low sound volume when picking up messages remotely. 4) My unit had a defective power supply (LOUD hum) and AT&T would not replace it w/o sending in the whole unit. Not good, stay away.