Telephone landline "crackling" sound--observations please ?

[John Rumm]

quoted text -

Of course - your pair is wired up to a SLAM at the exchange.

[Huge]

I've recorded the line noise and played it back to a human being before now.

[Dave Liquorice]

Or when talking to the fault reporting operative "Hear that?"...

[Andy Dingley]

Three houses, all with BT lines and non-BT ISPs. Dreadful service from BT over all of them, on just this issue. One complaint ended up with Ofcom.

[Huge]

Err, that's what I meant.

[Terry Fields]

I've heard it said that connecting a 15k or 18k resistor across the A and B wires provides enough 'wetting' current to avoid problems caused by poor contacts.

Apparently a resistor of this value allows enough current to pass but not enough to show up as a fault condition.

Never needed to do it myself, and it doubtless is against BT's T&C so can't advise it as a way forward.

TF

[gilli]

Hello, I have now found the master socket which is in the loft !!!!! and, plugging into it solved the problem.. so now resiting that socket in reach of another room so I can position the base station of the cordless phone there and service resumed. I am very grateful for all your comments which have helped me and probably many others as well. Thanks to you all David G.

[Terry Casey]

How are you going to do that without interfering with BT's wiring?

Wouldn't it be better in the long run to find the fault, now that you've proved it's your own network?

If you don't feel competent to do that, perhaps you should keep your hands away from BT's property ...

[John Rumm]

Fixing BB faults really seems to come down to the ISP IME. Some like Talk Talk are useless and will never escalate problems to openreach even when its obvious the fault is line related. In comparison, I have never had any difficulty getting say plusnet to escalate faults to openreach when required. If you go with a cheap/"free" ISP then they are very reluctant to pay BT to fix faults.

[Pete Zahut]

I'll almost guarantee that that is down to the ISPs being reluctant to pay BT for their services rather than your assertion above but if you have proof to back up your claim I'd be very interested to see/hear it.

[Andy Dingley]

The worst of these three was Talk Talk, who were just as you describe. In the end it was easier to cease the service and just move house, although there were also problems with Talk Talk continuing to bill after this.

[John Rumm]

Yup, I can well believe that. We have had a few customers go to them. Generally if everything works ok from the start then the service is passable. However if you get a problem you can enter a whole world of hurt!

Best/worst example from my SiL - she asked me if she should move to their combined phone service with "free" BB. I told her to steer well clear, but she did it anyway - "because it is Free!" The BB never worked from the start - no DSL sync at the house so obviously a line fault. However every time she phoned tech support (at 10p / min) say waiting at a recorded message for a couple of hours each time, she took pot luck as to which menu the support droid was following. Sometimes it was "we don't support Macs" other times, "not that version of OSX", usually "we don't support routers, you must use the modem we supplied - please install that and phone back". Then "oh no that modem does not work on a mac, haven't you got a router?". Sometimes she would get lucky and they would re-check her TCP/IP settings (not understanding the significance of the fact she could talk to the routers config page and it had no sync!), or best of all they would insist she needs to re-install the OS!

Anyway after she had spent £750 on the phone to support[1] going round variations of the loop above, and letters had been ignored, she managed to get an email address for the MD. After some correspondece with him, managed to get released from their rather draconian 18 month contract and get a MAC code out of them. (he did also refund some of the support money). Moved the line to Plusnet - as you would expect it still had the same fault, raised a fault on it, and within a couple of days a BT bod was round to locate and find an unwanted external box of tricks on the line that was blocking the DSL signal.

[1] I could not help but remind her "but it is Free!" - which I never felt she really appreciated ;-)

[Owain]

Although if you take Plusnet phone+broadband over 18 months it's still (a bit) cheaper than Talktalk.

Within unlimited overnight downloads on plusnet

Owain

[John Rumm]

Yup, but once she had got the idea something was "free" no amount of logic was going to stand in the way!

[Windmill]

She said she couldn't!

Which just might be true, giving her the benefit of the doubt, if they have fancy filtering to improve the sound quality in their headsets.

And there are things like hybrid transformers which might affect relative volume levels at her end and mine.

The problem was intermittently there for about a year, so like others, I resorted to recording the crackle.