A communication device, such as a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateway, determines a duration for Dual Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) tone portions of telephony signal. If the duration is less than a pre-determined amount, a minimum duration is enforced during DTMF playback at a remote end of a network connection connected to a destination gateway. Minimum playback duration can be enforced at the terminating gateway--however, the originatinggateway can also encode a DTMF packet with a minimum duration value. At the terminating receiver it is not always possible to playback exactly what happened at the originating point in the same time frame. One solution to is to, at the terminating gateway, drop the first portion of voice packets that overlap with the end portion of played back DTMF tones.