your cellular phone doesnt use the wires in your home. it is completely
wirelesss through cell antennas scattered around the countryside.

your private wired local carry around portabe phone (your cell?) that u may
get perhaps 300 feet from home with is not a "cell"phone.

if u have a multi terminal commercial phone junction box in your "home", you
may have a poor connection at one of the wires to terminal joints. they are
almost always just push-in type. they get loose and you get all sorts of
troubles. corrosion fron salt air make things worse(if you live near
oceans)

& with the phone company crooks tryng to charge you up to $60 buck per
quarter hour to'diagnose" your problems, i do advise you to be cautious when
calling them.

anything you do to complicate the trouble will cost u dearly.

if you have so many wires as u describe, u have a business connection,

or you may have an existing DSL or high speed service that is as yet still
working. a simple dsl filter may be the solution to this problem also. some
phones will operate very strangley withot a fiolter

even the phone you use is suspect. try it at a neighbors home. (get to know
them, they are valuable allies against poor phone service representatives)





wrote in message
ups.com...
I just moved into a new house and have a problem with the phone system.
We get a dial tone and can make calls, but when someone tries to call
us they get a ring which then breaks into static; the phone doesn't
even ring at our house (This happens, by the way, if only one working
phone is plugged into a jack or even if no phones are plugged into any
jacks in the house, so it's not a problem with my phone.) I took a
phone outside and plugged it into the jack at the network interface and
was able to receive a cell phone call fine, so I'm guessing the problem
is in the house.

Last night I opened an access panel in the basement to check the phone
wiring coming into the house -- quite a tangle of wires! -- and, with
assistance from various websites on the Internet, was able to finally
make some sense of all the connections, though the problem wasn't
immediately apparent.

I'm hoping someone could tell me what might be causing this. Can a
problem at one of the jacks cause a problem with the whole system even
if no phone is plugged into that jack? Or is the problem more likely
to be with the wires coming into the house? Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for any insight or suggestions.