When I was with Rogers previously, they would forward a call to voicemail after 20 seconds. I noticed with Public Mobile, calls forward to voicemail after 25 seconds. Did not appear configurable, until I stumbled upon how in some old GSM documentation, and it works with Public Mobile! It's as easy as adding two stars and the number of seconds to the usual manual *61 command.
First of all, note your current voicemail number is configured for "Conditional call forwarding when no reply" or "unanswered" for use in the new setting:
Dial *#61#
In my case, I get this response:
Now, you can set any delay in 5 second increments up to 30 seconds, for example:
dial *61*3065804001**15#
Great, so its now set. To confirm that your setting was committed, use the query command, and you should see the desired number of seconds, along with the target phone number:
dial *#61#
That's it! Now my phone won't ring nearly as long if I'm not there to answer it right away. This is equivalent to about 3 rings.
If you screw up your conditional call forward setting, you can quickly "undo" everything and revert them to Public Mobile defaults:
##61# - Revert only unanswered conditional call forward to your regular voicemail deposit #, and 25 seconds.
##004# revert all three conditional call forward settings (Busy/Declined,no answer/no reply,unreachable)
Cheers! - N.
PS: Now, only if the other method documented in the GSM for forwarding SMS messages would work.. It appears the GSM standard defined a way, but virtually no carrier actually supports it...
( * * 21 * telephone number*service number #) - service # being 16 for SMS...
