Any telephony experts out there?

[RogerS]

Just had the line moved over from one flat to the other one. I took my standard no-frills phone and plugged it into the socket in the new flat. Dial tone and the new line all works tikkety-boo.

Removed the no-frills phone and took my Panasonic answerphone and plugged that in to the socket. No dial tone. Replugged the no-frill phone. Dial tone present. Double check the Panasonic and still no dial tone.

This suggests the Panasonic has decided to die.

So, to double-check, take the Panasonic back downstairs to the other flat. Plug it in. Dial tone.

So the Panasonic works downstairs but not upstairs and that has got me stumped.

Any suggestions?

Grasping at straws here

 

[OLD]

Leads and plugs from LJU (bt socket) will it swop from no-frills to answer phone.

 

[RogerS]

Old..not sure I follow you.

Then I decided to check the master socket was OK (a new one fitted to the line in the new flat) but didn't really expect it to be dodgy since nofrill phone worked OK. Anyway..removed the BT socket from the old flat line and connected that to the new flat line...still same symptoms. Baffling.

Called BT. They did a line check (OK Sir) and so I booked an engineer for tomorrow.

Talking this through with an old telco chum he suggested that more that two lines were needed so I checked in the old flat but not true. Two wires is all I use. Back upstairs.

Decide to reconnect another master socket (previously tried) and surprise, surprise. Now all working.

I'm pretty sure that I didn't have any bad connections and so that's not the answer. Just guess I'll put it down to the telephony fairies as BT swear blind that they've done nothing at their end.

I will, however, leave on a true story and you can make your own minds up as to whether it was just one of those things. :twisted:

When working on BBC Outside Broadcasts many years ago, we used to cover major football matches from Wembley. Often many, many Eurovision commentators would arrive and BT would set up dedicated telephones for them. Now one of the BBC engineers (who lived in Wembley) noticed that on these days his home telephone went dead. Clearly BT were nicking his line to give to Eurovision for the day. BT swore blind that they never did that. He, of course, could not prove otherwise until....

One day he happened to be covering the football and his job was setting up monitors for the Eurovision commentators. He noticed that one of the telephones was labelled up with his home telephone number ! So he called BT to complain and the conversation went along these lines..

BT .."No Sir, we never do anything like that"

Engineer.."Well, how come I'm speaking to you on a telephone with my number on it and I'm standing in the Eurovision commentary box at Wembley?".

A very long pause.

BT .."Ah...we'll look into this for you, Sir" and he never lost his telephone line again :lol:

EDIT: Hadn't quite appreciated how separate broadband and telephony are. 9am this morning the BT speech line moved. Still get dial tone on the old line but no incoming or outgoing calls. Fair enough. But my Zen broadband connection is still working!

 

[DaveL]

EDIT: Hadn't quite appreciated how separate broadband and telephony are. 9am this morning the BT speech line moved. Still get dial tone on the old line but no incoming or outgoing calls. Fair enough. But my Zen broadband connection is still working!

The ADSL is a separate set of leads punched on the exchange end of the local loop, it has to be physically moved, but the number for the pstn is just a software configuration change.