Phone has no dial tone DSL WORKS OK?

[ray b]

phone has no dial tone DSL WORKS OK??

my home phone has no dial tone but the DSL works fine
no incomeing calls eathor
I went out to the outside box and checked the connections
no dial tone there eathor, but as you can see by this post
I am on line!
called [on the cell] the local bell system office and played message tag intill
I got a live person BUT they said two weeks before they will send out a line man
I think "IT'' must be a screwup on their end

IDEAS??
any else ever have this kind of problem?

 

[Evo]

my home phone has no dial tone but the DSL works fine
no incomeing calls eathor
I went out to the outside box and checked the connections
no dial tone there eathor, but as you can see by this post
I am on line!
called [on the cell] the local bell system office and played message tag intill
I got a live person BUT they said two weeks before they will send out a line man
I think "IT'' must be a screwup on their end

IDEAS??
any else ever have this kind of problem?

Have you tried at least two different telephone sets and two different phone cords? If you take a dead phone and plug it in outside, the outside line is going to appear "dead". I would guess it's the phone or phone cord.

 

[Anttech]

Good point evo,

The Dial tone you hear is given to you by the teleco switch.. where-ever that may be... So if you can rule out a handset problem, it sounds like a config problem there end.

 

[ray b]

have three 3 phones in the house
they all went dead at the same time
took phone to the outside box and tryed direct test plug
there by bypassing all inside wires, spliters, ect
also tried to plug into dsl line plug
still no dial tone
but DSL working fine
no bad weather/lighting ect

 

[Evo]

Hmmmm, what happens when you dial your phone number from another phone (like your cell), do you get a busy signal or do you hear a ring? I'm guessing you'll get a busy.

If the central office is receiving a signal that your phone is in use, you would hear no dial tone and your DSL would still work. It could be a short in the wiring, either inside your home or outside, or a signal is hung in the central office. This would also happen if someone called you and never hung up. The central office will eventually tear down the connection. If they would just have a tech get on top of your line, they could tell.

Unplug all of your phones, then one at a time plug one in and test for a dial tone. A faulty phone set plugged in could be the culprit also.

 

[ray b]

cell phone call rings in the cell phone
not the home phone and trying to answer results in no connection or change in the cell phone [cell keeps ringing]

 

[Evo]

cell phone call rings in the cell phone
not the home phone and trying to answer results in no connection or change in the cell phone [cell keeps ringing]

Well, I'm stumped then. I worked many years at the local phone company before moving on and I'll have to do some more thinking.

Do you have call waiting?

 

[ray b]

Do you have call waiting?

no call waiting

 

[Moonbear]

Unplug all of your phones, then one at a time plug one in and test for a dial tone. A faulty phone set plugged in could be the culprit also.

I'd suggest unplugging EVERYTHING, including the computer connected on DSL, and then just plugging in one phone to see if you get dial tone. This will tell you if it's your equipment causing a problem or if it's really a line problem (if it's an equipment problem, it'll save you the cost of a service call if you can plug things back in one at a time and identify the culprit yourself).

 

[ray b]

by pulling the test jack connection everything in the house is out of the curcut, at that point only the wire from the pole and the outside box are connected every thing else is out

 

[Evo]

by pulling the test jack connection everything in the house is out of the curcut, at that point only the wire from the pole and the outside box are connected every thing else is out

True, you are testing the line from the junction box, but there is a chance (albeit small) that the phone you used to test with is defective. That is why I suggested testing with more than one phone/cord outside or unplugging everything inside and testing them one at a time. You said all three phones went out, it could be one phone causing it and if you used that one phone to test outside, you'd get no dial tone. But usually only I would run into that scenario.

 

[Anttech]

cell phone call rings in the cell phone
not the home phone and trying to answer results in no connection or change in the cell phone [cell keeps ringing]

Let me get this straight: You can dial your cell phone from your home phone, and hear it ringing in the handset of cell phone? Or you can dial your home phone from cell phone and hear it ringing on handset of home phone, but are unable to answer?
If this is so it means you have signalling working, but no voice paths. which can only mean you have a misconfig somewhere

 

[ray b]

when calling from the cell phone I get a ring in the cell not a busy signial or out of service message
but no ring on the home phone end

 

[Anttech]

hmmm... I think that is normal, if you have an analogue line (in europe at least) and u unplug a fax or a phone from it you will still hear a ring on the handset you are dialing the number with...

I'll test this tomorrow, but afai rememeber that's how it works...

 

[Danger]

Relax, Ray; it's just the CIA tapping your line. As usual, they screwed it up somehow.

 

[Evo]

hmmm... I think that is normal, if you have an analogue line (in europe at least) and u unplug a fax or a phone from it you will still hear a ring on the handset you are dialing the number with...

I'll test this tomorrow, but afai rememeber that's how it works...

Yes, you hear the ring regardless of if anything is actually plugged in.

What a lot of people don't know is that with many cell phone companies, the first few rings you hear are not actually the phone ringing that you are calling, it is a recording of a phone ringing. It sometimes takes a second or two to make a connection. When there is just silence, people think the phone is not working, so they hang up and redial. To prevent this, the cell phone company starts a recording of a phone ringing so you have something to listen to while the actual connection is being made.

 

[turbo]

Relax, Ray; it's just the CIA tapping your line. As usual, they screwed it up somehow.

That's it. When they tapped my line last week, somehow I could hear the agents on the other end talk to one another. Something about taking Cheney to Romania and "waterboarding" him to find out who outed Valerie Plame. They kept giggling and saying "Hey! it's not torture!"

 

[Danger]

 

[Anttech]

What a lot of people don't know is that with many cell phone companies, the first few rings you hear are not actually the phone ringing that you are calling, it is a recording of a phone ringing. It sometimes takes a second or two to make a connection. When there is just silence, people think the phone is not working, so they hang up and redial. To prevent this, the cell phone company starts a recording of a phone ringing so you have something to listen to while the actual connection is being made.

I use that trick every day when configuring a PBX especially Vectors in a call center.. :-) give them a couple of rings, then an annoucment then a couple more rings then hold music then annoucment then into the loop of hell for 30 mins until the "next available rep is available" muuhaaaa... pure torture..

 

[Moonbear]

I use that trick every day when configuring a PBX especially Vectors in a call center.. :-) give them a couple of rings, then an annoucment then a couple more rings then hold music then annoucment then into the loop of hell for 30 mins until the "next available rep is available" muuhaaaa... pure torture..

You're one of THOSE people? If I knew that before, I'd have never voted for you as guru. I get those stupid 30 minutes of menus, and I've always been sure it's just to give me something to do while I'm sitting on hold for someone who can actually answer my question (I'd prefer just getting hold music for 30 min so I can just turn on the speaker phone and do something else instead of pushing menu buttons while waiting).

That's funny that you get a recording of the rings. I don't think my company does that...I just get silence for a bit until a connection is made. It never bothered me. Though, I'm not sure what goes on once a connection is made. When I've called myself to check if a phone is working, etc., I know the rings are not synchronized very well. I think my mom's phone company must give her recorded rings though. She complains my voice mail takes forever to pick up...5 or 6 rings. I have it set to pick up on 4 rings, and I know if I'm sitting here watching the caller ID saying it's Mom, it only rings 4 times before it transfers to voice mail (how did I ever live so long without caller ID? I even gave Mom her own ring so I know not to hurry over to the phone. ).

As for Ray's problem, if disconnecting everything doesn't work, then it's in the lines (I've made the mistake before, after a power failure, when reconnecting my modem in the dark, of plugging the phone line into the ethernet port on the computer...the phones don't work when you do that...and of course I then assumed it was that the phones were out due to the storm that had knocked the power out . Fortunately I realized it before the phone company came out and I had to pay them for a service call.) That's why I suggested unplugging everything, because silly things like that can make it seem like the phone line isn't working, when it's just some goofy thing with the equipment on the phone line.

 

[Anttech]

You're one of THOSE people?

muuhhaaaa :-) Be nice to me or ill put lots of menus up there lol

 

[ray b]

FIXED
bad wire in the local area box a block away
DSL only needs one wire
phone needs two wires

 

[Evo]

FIXED
bad wire in the local area box a block away
DSL only needs one wire
phone needs two wires

Thanks Ray, I've not run across that one.

 

[Averagesupernova]

FIXED
DSL only needs one wire
phone needs two wires

That's what they told you?

 

[Evo]

I think what he means is that both wires need to be working for both the DSL and voice to work.

 

[Anttech]

DSL and phones in simplex mode are 2 wire, you can have VoIP setup with 4 wire

 

[turbo]

FIXED
bad wire in the local area box a block away
DSL only needs one wire
phone needs two wires

Nope. If both wires in that twisted pair were not good, your DSL would not work. What is likely is that the connecttion that supplies ring voltage to one of those wires was broken, so your phone never rang. If you called your house line using your cell phone and heard some ring tones on the cell, you would have been able to pick up the wired phone in your house and made the connection.

 

[ray b]

Nope. If both wires in that twisted pair were not good, your DSL would not work. What is likely is that the connecttion that supplies ring voltage to one of those wires was broken, so your phone never rang. If you called your house line using your cell phone and heard some ring tones on the cell, you would have been able to pick up the wired phone in your house and made the connection.

NO TRYED THAT , called fron the cell phone while in the room with the nonworking phone
no ring no connection and the cell phone keep ringing after answering the
phone
lineman said DSL will work on a single line/wire but the phone needs two
but claimed the DSL would be slower on one line
before this mess I thought if the phone went out the DSL would die to that's why I started this thread

 

[Averagesupernova]

The OP says he didn't have dial tone. It's not likely he would have picked up the phone and heard himself on his cell. I think they just gave him an answer to satisfy him. Where I live they run fiber optics to a box that is several miles away from the main switch in order for DSL to work for those that are more than several miles away from the main switch. The fiber is for the DSL. I suspect the POTS line (Plain Old Telephone Service) is still the old twisted pair coming from the main switch. Might be wrong, but it could explain the OP's failure.

I picked up the phone one day and noticed that it wouldn't dial. Older push button phone. They are polarity sensitive. I knew all I had to do was reverse the wires in my network interface but I wanted to tell off the phone company anyway. So I put the notice in and told them to have the line tech call me at work. When I got the call I told him about it and he said he was surprised that there were any phones out there like that yet. He acknowledged messing with my pair and switched it back. My point here is that the phone company is certainly not above making mistakes. And THAT could be a reason why they fed him a line. I truly don't believe that DSL needs only one wire to work. You can't even run a cheap phone cord for more than a few feet and have decent DSL service. It needs to stay a true twisted pair. Having one wire disconnected even with an alternate return path would be a seriously unbalanced transmission line and the loss would attenuate the signal severely by the time the signal actually got to your modem.

 

[turbo]

NO TRYED THAT , called fron the cell phone while in the room with the nonworking phone
no ring no connection and the cell phone keep ringing after answering the
phone
lineman said DSL will work on a single line/wire but the phone needs two
but claimed the DSL would be slower on one line
before this mess I thought if the phone went out the DSL would die to that's why I started this thread

Your DSL connection would not have worked if you did not have continuity and a good clean path on BOTH halves of the twisted copper pair. Also, the DSL connection might not have worked at all, had your tel-co have introduced a bridge tap that effectively introduced more distance between your home and the switch. They lied to you.