telephone not working

[sid]

I have a telephone "fixe" FT (Orange), plus the basic ADSL service. The phone stopped working on Saturday; there was lots of crackling initially and then it went dead altogether. Now there is no dialtone, nothing. The internet is still working though, albeit very slowly and intermittantly. The sync light on my router keeps flashing so I assume it's having to reconnect fairly frequently.

After a struggle I've got a technician coming tomorrow afternoon. When I say struggle I mean it's difficult, if not impossible, to contact FT/Orange by any other means than telephone! This is great when you want to report that your phone is not working!! In the end I got a neighbour to phone for me.

I've checked all the obvious stuff, disconnected everything, reconnected items one by one, substituted known good ADSL filters for the current ones etc and I bet I have to go through the whole palaver again tomorrow AND explain why I don't have a Livebox!!

At the end of September a tractor got its "spraying arms" caught in the overhead phone lines just 100m down the road. The driver didn't notice and carried on, pulling down all the wires and snapping two telegraph poles into the bargain. These were replaced and we were reconnected by the next day (I'm sure it would have taken longer in UK!) and everything has been fine until this weekend. In my mind I'm convinced there's a bad connection on one of these new poles and the weather is somehow affecting it.

Does anyone have any explanation for how the ADSL service could be working (after a fashion) but the phone is off?

 

[Quillan]

Because the system uses checksum's so if a packet arrives thats wrong it gets resent which is why it is very slow. It's also the reason why you get echo's on voip phones yet the quality is still quite good.

[sid]

Sounds plausible, thanks Quillan. I wondered if it was attempting to resend until it went (or arrived). But why wouldn't the voice signal work at all? Just too bad a connection for that sort of traffic? Not even a crackly dialtone now.

I'm not looking forward to the technician's visit. I just hope that he checks outside first because I'm sure it's not my stuff inside the house! [blink]

 

[woolybanana]

he will want to check you indoor telephone cables too

[Pierre ZFP]

Slightly off-topic but exactly the same thing happened to my wife last week in the UK,  phone not working, internet OK, not even particulaly slow.

BT engineer came round pretty quick and after getting up the pole outside declared that a wire had come adrift and he reattached it.  All now fine.

When asked why the internet was working he apparently said 'Internet only needs one wire, the phone needs two'

I wondered if this coincided with a herd of bulls stampeding down the road?

BTW if the BT engineer had to trace the fault inside the house, we were told that there would be a charge of £127  [:'(]

[Jay]

[quote user="woolybanana"]he will want to check you indoor telephone cables too[/quote]

I don't think he will. We had similar problems twice and both times the engineer fixed the line without calling at our house. We got a phone call to say the repair had been carried out.

[Martin963]

'Internet only needs one wire, the phone needs two'

Whilst the words of the BT engineer are something of a sweeping statement,   my guess is that what was being described is that the ADSL signal is running at - basically -  radio frequencies.   In fact I think they run from about 300 kHz up to 1.1 MHz,   which is in reality medium wave and a bit below.    Now RF behaves oddly at times and can "hop" over cable breaks to a certain extent.    I'm only guessing here but maybe in some circs ADSL will indeed limp on even if the baseband audio (ie up to 4 kHz) is dead due to an open circuit.

I've seen similar in RF distribution systems,   where VHF Band II (ie FM radio) stopped dead in a junction box in a block of flats whereas the UHF TV signals got through it fine.    Turned out to be a faulty connection,   but it attenuated the VHF signal by a huge amount but with little effect on UHF.

But if someone knows otherwise....?

[Quillan]

[quote user="Martin963"]'Internet only needs one wire, the phone needs two'

Whilst the words of the BT engineer are something of a sweeping statement,   my guess is that what was being described is that the ADSL signal is running at - basically -  radio frequencies.   In fact I think they run from about 300 kHz up to 1.1 MHz,   which is in reality medium wave and a bit below.    Now RF behaves oddly at times and can "hop" over cable breaks to a certain extent.    I'm only guessing here but maybe in some circs ADSL will indeed limp on even if the baseband audio (ie up to 4 kHz) is dead due to an open circuit.

I've seen similar in RF distribution systems,   where VHF Band II (ie FM radio) stopped dead in a junction box in a block of flats whereas the UHF TV signals got through it fine.    Turned out to be a faulty connection,   but it attenuated the VHF signal by a huge amount but with little effect on UHF.

But if someone knows otherwise....?
[/quote]

Good description but ADSL or DSL does need a pair. What some people say is that you might increase your speed by removing the 'ring wire' which might lead to some confusion, for a more detailed but not too techy description you might like THIS

[Martin963]

Absolutely,   I wasn't suggesting that it would work with only one wire throughout!

I don't think the French system uses the third in-house wire in most cases,   but certainly in Britain the speed of ADSL can be transformed by removing it or using a BT iplate.

Ours went up from 472 kbps to 1.9 Mbps once the iplate was put in.

[pachapapa]

[quote user="Jay"][quote user="woolybanana"]he will want to check you indoor telephone cables too[/quote]

I don't think he will. We had similar problems twice and both times the engineer fixed the line without calling at our house. We got a phone call to say the repair had been carried out.
[/quote]

FT only responsible for lines up to DTI, from DTI onwards it is the subscribers problem with the singular exception of the sub-contractor used by FT to effect the initial telephone socket installation.

[Quillan]

[quote user="Martin963"]Absolutely,   I wasn't suggesting that it would work with only one wire throughout!

I don't think the French system uses the third in-house wire in most cases,   but certainly in Britain the speed of ADSL can be transformed by removing it or using a BT iplate.

Ours went up from 472 kbps to 1.9 Mbps once the iplate was put in.
[/quote]

Sorry for my misunderstanding.

The removing of the 'bell wire', I have read, can have a great effect on speed but sometimes not. I think I read that it improved in about 80% of cases. Another thing that is recommended is to go round and re-make the connections on the back of all your wall socket as this is normally, with age, where most loss's occur.

[sid]

I'm sorry I haven't been able to reply to these latest posts but the line here was gone a lot worse. No connection at all yesterday afternoon and a very fragile internet this morning.

Needless to say I'm eextremely frustrated that the Orange technician didn't turn up yesterday after I waited all day. The Customer (non) service person just did the equivalent of a "telephone shrug" and said she had no idea why he hadn't come. Very helpful. I'm awaiting more news via my neighbour.

Grrrrr!

 

[Quillan]

It could be the weather what with the rain and it being damp. I also suspect like some of the other 'services' that the engineer ran out of time yesterday. We have a call in with EDF to check our electricity meter (again) and they can't get anyone here till the 20th. It's not a big problem but I do know they are a bit short handed at the moment. I agree it's very frustrating hanging around for somebody to come then they never turn up, you feel your day is somewhat wasted so I sympathise.

[pachapapa]

Internet definitely requires four wires

.Personally, I have got a Personal Computer and it has a funny shaped transparent plug which goes in a hole in the side; the transparent thing has four different coloured wires in it. I cant remember what the colours are but I'll check if that will be of any help.

[Quillan]

[quote user="pachapapa"]

Internet definitely requires four wires

.Personally, I have got a Personal Computer and it has a funny shaped transparent plug which goes in a hole in the side; the transparent thing has four different coloured wires in it. I cant remember what the colours are but I'll check if that will be of any help.

[/quote]

I would stick to mines if I were you. [:(]

[pachapapa]

[quote user="Quillan"][quote user="pachapapa"]

Internet definitely requires four wires

.Personally, I have got a Personal Computer and it has a funny shaped transparent plug which goes in a hole in the side; the transparent thing has four different coloured wires in it. I cant remember what the colours are but I'll check if that will be of any help.

[/quote]

I would stick to mines if I were you. [:(]

[/quote]

One of the wires is red.

[Quillan]

It's more likely to be an Ethernet cable and your router (or modem if you prefer) connects, like many, via Ethernet so you can have more than one computer accessing the Internet via a hard wired connection at any one time. The cable, although slightly different, that goes from the router to the filter/wall socket will also be multi pair and may well have all the wires connected at each end. However if you look at the back of your phone socket you will find just two (possibly three at most) wires connected.

[sid]

Dramatic fanfare music sound effect!

The engineer has just been. It turned out to be a bad connection in the little box on the side of the house where the overhead lines arrives. I've no idea what the problem was but he fixed it in a couple of minutes. Very odd as there has been no change to this since we arrived 6 years ago.

A friend gave me the English-speaking helpline number and I called that form my mobile (stood in the very cold garden!!). Whilst I normally manage OK with the language on the phone it is MUCH easier to speak English! So that's 10/10 for the helpline number.

Thanks for all the input

Sid

[Quillan]

You should have checked the forum, it's in this section under FAQ's http://www.completefrance.com/cs/forums/1801254/ShowPost.aspx [;-)]

Sounds like it was similar to a problem we had years ago. In our case it was the wind blowing the line and after many years the insulation cracked letting in water that caused the wire to corrode. We spent more time on the phone arranging the appointment than it took him to fix it. Anyway good news, glad your OK now.

[sid]

Yes, thanks Quillan. Unfortunately the internet connection was so poor that I couldn't stay online for more than a minute or so! Searching was hopeless. I had to type my posts in Notepad and quickly paste them in and send before losing the connection again. However I have noted the number for future reference and normally I would do a search first.