"Your call cannot be completed as dialed."

This message might be played when dialing your unit on the intercom.

Your call cannot be completed as dialed.

This message is usually played by the intercom panel itself, not something coming from your phone carrier. It just means the panel tried to dial your FreshBuzzer number and the building's phone line refused to place the call. The reasons for this are most likely one of these two:

• Your FreshBuzzer number is not in the local calling area of your building's phone line.
• The phone number was not entered correctly, e.g. some digits are missing or mixed up.

This is not a call-forwarding problem - the call never reaches FreshBuzzer at all, it fails on the building's side before it ever leaves the building's phone line. That also means every FreshBuzzer feature that depends on the call arriving will look broken at once, including Call Forwarding and Auto Buzz - there's no call for FreshBuzzer to forward or auto-answer if it never gets that far.

Possible Solutions

After double checking that the FreshBuzzer phone number has been entered correctly into the intercom AND making sure you can call it from your or any other phone, you unfortunately will have to get a different phone number.

Most intercoms prevent adding a phone number as "+1 (500) 123-0000" and instead only allow "(500) 123-0000" which prevents any long distance calls (those used to be expensive a few decades ago!).

In contrary to popular belief, the area code (first 3 digits) are not the most important factor for local calling. It is the combination of the first 3 digits AND second 3 digits. If you know your building's phone number, you can use the Local Number Search to find a phone number within the local calling area of your building.

If you don't know the building's number but maybe one of your neighbour's, you might be lucky to get a similar phone number matching the first 6 digits.

If all else fails, a toll-free number has worked for some FreshBuzzer customers. In any case, it is recommended to open a ticket to get personalized assistance.

For your building manager or intercom installer

Feel free to forward this section along if you're not the one managing the intercom system.

On some systems (DoorKing is a common one), just updating the directory entry with the new number isn't enough — the system may have a separate setting for which numbers count as "long distance," and a number won't dial out correctly until it's added there too. If you manage the phone system, it's worth checking your intercom's programming manual for something like a long-distance or area-code list, separate from the resident directory itself, and confirming the new number's area code has been added to it.

We don't have visibility into your specific intercom model or setup, so we can't walk you through exact steps here - but that's usually the first thing worth checking with whoever installed or maintains the system.