DEAD — Dead Call

What DEAD Means

A call that connected but produced silence or dead air — the far end answered but no audio was detected. Can indicate carrier issues, one-way audio problems, or AMD misclassification.

When This Status Is Set

DEAD is assigned automatically when VICIdial’s dead-call detection triggers on a connected call that produces silence or dead air — the far end answered (SIP 200 OK was received) but no audio was detected on the RTP stream within the configured threshold. The dead_trigger and dead_trigger_seconds settings control how long the system waits for audio before classifying the call as dead. This can occur due to one-way audio problems (where the contact can hear the agent but not vice versa), carrier-level RTP routing failures, NAT traversal issues, or codec negotiation mismatches. In some cases, AMD may also misclassify a very short human greeting as dead air if the audio analysis window is too narrow.

Impact on List Management

DEAD leads are typically recyclable and should be included in your dial_status_filter with a short delay, since the dead-air condition is more often a technical issue than a reflection of the lead’s contactability. However, if a lead produces DEAD on multiple consecutive attempts, the problem may be specific to that number’s carrier path — flag leads with two or more DEAD outcomes for manual review before continuing to recycle them. High DEAD rates across many leads simultaneously almost always point to an infrastructure problem on your end (SIP trunk misconfiguration, RTP port exhaustion, firewall rules blocking media) rather than a list quality issue. Track DEAD volumes per carrier trunk in vicidial_carrier_log to isolate whether the problem is confined to a specific outbound route or affects all traffic.

Best Practices

• Monitor DEAD rate by carrier trunk to identify problematic routes — a trunk producing over 5% DEAD calls likely has RTP or codec issues

• High DEAD rates often indicate RTP port range exhaustion or NAT traversal problems — verify your rtpstart/rtpend range in rtp.conf and ensure firewall rules permit bidirectional UDP

• Include DEAD in dial_status_filter for recycling with a short delay since the issue is usually technical, not contact-related

• If DEAD rate spikes after a server change, codec update, or trunk migration, immediately check SIP INVITE/200 OK exchanges for mismatched media addresses

• Flag leads with 3+ consecutive DEAD outcomes for manual review — the carrier path to that specific number may have a persistent routing issue

Admin Configuration

DEAD is a system-level status defined in Admin → System Statuses with callable set to Y. The dead-call detection thresholds are configured per-campaign under Campaign Detail → Dialing Options, where dead_trigger enables the feature and dead_trigger_seconds sets the silence duration that triggers DEAD classification. Lead recycling parameters for DEAD are configured in Campaign Detail → Lead Recycling with adjustable delay and attempt limits. To diagnose DEAD call causes, cross-reference vicidial_log entries with vicidial_carrier_log records to compare SIP signaling against actual audio delivery.

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