On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:50:39 -0700 (PDT), Thomarse wrote:

On Aug 15, 2:17*pm, "Bob Mannix" wrote:
"Thomarse" wrote in message

...





Hi,

I dont know if this would be the right place to ask but.. worth a
try..

Recently our home landline has been playing up and I wonder if anyone
has any clues what coudl be the problem, I wonder if it is the line or
something else.

Basically what happens is the phone will ring, but when we answer it
sounds like a crackly line but no one is there and then when we hang
up we cant get a dial tine agian, sometiome for hours and no one can
phoen in, the phone goes straight to BT answer 1571.

The other day the phone rang and we didnt get to it so I dialled 1471
and it gave me an 0800 number. I rang the number back to see who it
was as this had happened alot recently and it was just someones house,
and they had no idea who I was... very strange! Can lines get
crossed?!

We have 1 standard phone line coming into the house, into which we
have plugged:

our house phones (3 cordless)
wireless internet router (sky)
sky tv box
a shopping monitor hand held computer (my wife scans her shoping each
week and it uploads what we buy and we get vouchers etc...

I wonder if one of these is cousing the problem, however when teh line
has been dead, I have unplugged all of these and it still doesnt come
back!

Any ideas?

Thanks

You should have a master socket (assuming a BT landline). Remove the two
screws and pull the lower half of the front off. This will reveal a phone
socket. Use this with one good phone to test the line. If the problem has
gone away then the fault lies in the wiring inside your house (which is
taken from the removable section). If it persists, it is a problem for BT
(who will ask if you have done this)

If it is your house wiring, possible causes are water ingress into the
wiring and damaged cables where you have drilled into a wall and just nicked
the cable (I did this myself once)

--
Bob Mannix
(anti-spam is as easy as 1-2-3 - not)- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Thanks for the reply.

I only have the master socket, into which I plug my phone etc so I
have no internal wiring (except for my sky box)


But what Bob is saying is that you need to remove the bottom half of the
panel and connect into the socket that you reveal. It is possible that you
_do_ have internal wiring, you just don't know about it. In any case,
again as Bob says, BT will ask you to do this so you might as well do it
now.

I guess the first thing to do is call BT and get them to check the
line, can they do this over the phone or do they need to send an
engineer out? I guess if the line problem is intermitant then they may
not pick it up.

They can test the line over the phone, but it won't necessarily help if the
problem isn't straightforward (and it seems like your might not be). Dial
151 IIRC and there's an option to test your line.

When at university myself and a friend in a nearby room both had our own BT
lines. Whenever he called me, after we ended the call, I'd lose my
dial-tone and calls into me wouldn't work. Whenever I rang BT to report
the problem they did an automated test which cleared out the problem. In
the end I managed to get an engineer out and he discovered that my line and
my friend's line had been miswired in some way.

Piers