On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:22:06 +0000, Peter smith wrote:

There is no dial tone when a phone is plugged in.

Is there anyway I can activate the line ...

Short answer:

No.

or does this require some special equipment to do ?

Long answer:

The wiring within the building may be present, probably done by the
builder. BT may have installed a street cable into the building but
they probably won't have connected the two bits together and the
street cable may only go as far as the nearest green box or a joint
box in a manhole and be unconnected that end as well.

Depending on the route and capacity of the local cables, it may take
BT quite a while to connect that line back to the exchange. And as
they have a "universal service obligation" to provide voice telephony
even if they spend a several days and several engineers making that
connection all you'll pay is that hundred odd quid that you have been
quoted.

I thought all young things had mobiles surgically attached to an ear
these days. Does she need a landline? Daft question really yes she
does probably needs it for broadband(*)(though reasonable speeds can
be had on 3G) but mainly for resilience. When the power fails the
mobile networks also fail, some straight away some after a few
minutes. Very few cells have long term ( than an hour or two) power
back up. Even when the power comes back some take ages (day or two)
to come back online...

(*) I don't think you can side step the BT new install charge by
choosing a LLU provider, fairly sure their T&Cs demand an existing BT
line. But it could be worth looking but don't expect to save much.

--
Cheers
Dave.