Sorting out my noisy phone line

We have been with BT for years, but have been experiencing terrible problems for at least twelve months. First there was crackling on the line for a long time and now the line keeps going dead, we have phoned BT a number of times but all they say is that the line is clear and if they send an engineer and its our equipments fault there is a call out charge of £116.00 and £99 per hour or part of the time the engineer is on site. We can't afford that so we cannot take that chance, so we pay for a service that we don't receive most of the time and no one can help. We have tried four different phones and still the problem is there, I have even fitted a new box on the wall but it hasn't helped. We don't know what else to do. Our Broadband supplier is Virgin and is connected through the Cable and not the telephone socket.

Griff, sounds like a problem with the exchange to me,You dont say if you have any other problems like noise on voice calls etc. If it is just a loss of dial tone, then it wont matter what checks you do at your end. You need to get Tiscali to sort it out or threaten to take your business elswhere.

Hi..every morning my landline has no dial tone,preventing any outward calls being made.I have to call my landline from another phone(my mobile usually) let it ring a couple of times then hang up.When I pick up my landline I now have a dial tone and can call out! It stays on for the rest of the day and the following morning the whole thing starts again.My provider for broadband,telephone calls and line rental is tiscali,who have had engineers check to the house and found no probs.I have tried everything I know in the house to no avail.Anyone any ideas?

To Rob the crackle lover,

You say Christmas day yeah? Got any Christmas lights on, dimmer swicthed ect. EMi is your prob.

We are having exactly this issue too, except we are with TalkTalk. For the first week with them our phone and broadband worked perfectly. The problems started Christmas Day 2007. Picking up the phone we can hear huge amounts of static, popping and crackling sounds. Shortly after, it knocks out the broadband connection.

I'm an IT Manager myself, so I know what I'm doing (but try telling TalkTalk that!). I've replaced the router, the cables, the microfilters and even the phone!

Weirdly, this problem went away for two days, and everything worked perfectly again. But the issues returned with a vengeance again this evening!!!

Two line checks have come back saying the line is fine, but it's clearly not! I just want an engineer to come to my house, hear the problem for themselves and then fix it!

I've probably called TalkTalk about 15 times about this problem in the last month. The next step for me is a formal complaint letter to them wih Ofcom copied in for good measure!

I am with bt and aol. Up until recently...my perfect old BT Voyager 105 did the trick. I had to upgrade to a Router and become wireless as a bonus. Thats where it ended! Now I cant make or receive calls without the very noisy untuned Tv sound all over the line and then the dreaded "Goodbye" from aol where the broadband has also been dropped. I changed the filters and also threw away a cordless phone (which I thought was the problem initially). Only to find it was still there lurking and popping up randomly. So all I can say is it must be aol not my Router (or it would be all the time...not intermittent) Also BRITISH telecom..Why an Indian call centre with people who quite clearly havent got a clue what I am going on about and are obviously reading off a dummy sheet of questions which may as well ask me about the weather for all the help it does!!!!

We have a BT Voyager 2100 router along with a fax machine and two phone extensions. Not long after I installed our BT Router (2005) we started to notice a lot of noise on the line which would knock out our broadband altogether and make hearing voice callers very difficult. I contacted BT (India) many times who suggested the usual... Turn of your computer, reboot the router, check the line filters etc etc... Even I knew this wouldn't work as it never did before. I eventualy got through to a lady who I assume was speaking from BT UK who gave me a fault number and did suggest further testing from the master socket which I had already done via two separate (working) phones. The line was quiet but sometimes noise and crackles could be heard, once the router was connected though it seemed like static was being created within the line circuits somewhere and the broadband would drop out when it felt like. Picking up any phone in the house rectified this and the broadband would connect again.

I have now removed any wires located in pins 1,3,4 and 6 in the master socket, and all extensions as advised on many websites just hoping that this would stop the 'aerial' effect from the old bell wire that was used when (dinosours roamed the earth) sorry! Ages ago in BT home setups. However still the line noise is present or rather created 'somewhere' or by 'something'. I can't be bothered to ring BT anymore as I cant understand the call centre operators and they are wasting MY time telling ME to try the same things over and over again.

It seems like we're stuck with you BT as you ARE the devil we know, even though many people are leaving in droves in the hope of a cheaper servcie, a lot of them are suffering further issues after switching because 'all broadband providers' (apart from cable?) are using BT's VERY VERY OLD lines.

Perhaps I should do what BT do and start sending them letters promising a service that I can't provide? This time next year I could be a millionaire!

I've spent endless hours trying to get BT to sort out a noisy line. It's fine when I unplug the "bt micro" router but hissy when I plug it back in - I can even hear the modem synchronise with the dsl line. BT sold us all the equipment from a spoc (single point of contact) however, trying to find the person who could deal with this problem has proven that BT's policy is to wear people down by forcing them to make endless calls so that they can sit listening to the same short loop of crap music for hours and hours.

I finally asked to speak to someone's manager and they came back five minutes later telling me that I would need to call another number. I politely reminded them that I had asked to speak to a manager and finally spoke to one, who, to her credit, took ownership of the fault, even though it's not her department. After multiple engineer visits, cables swapped at the exchange, new filters and faceplates, multiple filters running in series and endless hours of phone calls to numbers that tell you it's not their problem, the fault still remains. Now they tell me I need to call a premium rate number at 65p/min to attempt to get this sorted. THIS IS UNDER WARRANTY! On top of that they want to charge us for engineer visits as they say the fault is not on the line. The system cost us £800 plus VAT - nearly £1000 - to be installed before even making a call. The above price does not include wiring which we were under the impression was part of the deal, but apparently not, so we've had to run it out through our own existing cat5 system.

If they don't fix it soon, the equipment is going into a box and back to BT. We are quite prepared to go to court over this. The equipment is unfit for service and the "customer service" has been almost non-existent.

Dry Fly, I think you'll find that these "elitists" are actually the shareholders of the company. These same shareholders that bought shares when the Thatcher government sold another company/asset off to the general public that in theory already owned it. I can promise you that they certainly don't pay the majority of their staff a huge wage, only the top brass.
Anyway, if the wiring in your house isn't broken then why replace it ?.

AHA, well I tried getting in touch with BT to ask them to replace wiring that has been in the house since it was built in 1939. I spent 3 days speaking to people in Indian call centres trying to explain my simple request, all to no avail, I had to give up ( that's the object of the exercise, to wear us down ). Now here is the point I would like to make, British Telecom JOKE, built and paid for by us clowns. Do you remember when these arrogant elitists didn't even bother to send us a detailed invoice, they just sent you a bill/demand and told you, payment was overdue, and you had no idea ( neither did they ) how they came to that figure. I ask myself everytime I get the BT bill, how are they not ashamed still charging me for wiring etc. that is older than the jokers who are creaming us,and was set up by us taxpayers decades ago.
Why do we put up with this madness, paying a few elitists, crazy money so they can fleece us.
every quarter, and fund a lifestyle we can only dream about.

John, do you have anything else connected to the phone line that is not filtered such as sky box etc. as this will cause noise but not normally intermittent.

My voice line becomes intermittently very noisy, but if I either switch off the BT Home Hub at the mains, or unplug it from the microfilter the noise stops. I have changed the microfilter twice and I have no other phone attached. I have tried another wireless modem (Belkin) - same result. Help!