TalkTalk landline problem - help needed please

[Osem]

Hi guys. My elderly mum in law has been having an intermittent problem with her household phone service for around a year, ever since she changed providers from Powergen (with Tesco BB) to TalkTalk (with their own BB). From what I can gather the problem manifests itself in calls being suddenly cut off, forcing her to redial the number. Sometimes she can immediately redial with no problems, other times she can't get through again for some time. She's reported this several times and been instructed to do the obvious fault finding things like unplugging her phones for a period of time and TalkTalk's response has been that they've tested the line and can find no fault remotely.

At present she has 2 home phones - 1 corded model and 1 cordless. At first I thought the cordless phone may be the root of problem (e.g. failing battery) but it happens on both phones and she seems pretty sure that it only happens when she's making a call. This would seem to rule out the possibility that her equipment is the cause of the issue and that it's more likely to be something else.

Her main concern other than the loss of service is that if she calls an engineer out she WILL be charged. I've told her that what they've probably said to her in the past is that she MAY be charged for a callout and that's normal if a fault is subsequently found to be the result of the subscriber's own equipment. Due to this, she appears to be happier to replace her phones but I still think the cause is something else and that she'll be wasting her money without solving the problem.

Can anyone offer any feedback/advice on this please. Sadly, she needs her landline as the mobile phone coverage in her area is very poor and she often can't get a signal.

Cheers!

If remote line tests are clear, then the problem is likely to be with the wiring or equipment in the house. This isn't guaranteed - there can still be faults that the remote test cannot detect, but it's less likely.

You need to get another corded phone and lend it to her for a couple of weeks. Open up her BT Master Socket and plug the phone directly into the test socket you'll find inside it. That way you are removing all of her own equipment and any internal extension wiring from the equation. If she can use the phone for a while without the problem recurring, you've isolated it as far as being either her own cordless phone, her own corded phone, or internal wiring.

From here you need to test her own kit a piece at a time. First plug her corded phone into the master test socket for a week. Then the cordless (but remind her to keep the corded phone next to the socket in case of emergencies), then close up the master and reconnect everything as normal. It's fairly likely that at some point in that process, the problem will reappear and you'll have found the culprit. If you go through all this and find no fault at all, then you should be able to call TalkTalk and insist they escalate it to BT to send an engineer, and be pretty confident that BT will find a problem somewhere that doesn't result in your mum-in-law being charged.

If at the end of this process BT somehow find a fault in her set-up that you have missed, and she gets charged for the callout, that's unfortunate but in the long-run I'd say it's better to have the problem isolated and professionally repaired than to let it potentially get worse and have her cut off entirely ...

[Osem]

Thanks for that Chris - very helpful.

After posting here I did a search and eventually found an outage page for TalkTalk. It states that (from 5.11.08) users in her area may be experiencing problems making/receiving calls and obtaining BB connections and that the issue remains unresolved. Nearly 2 weeks is a long time and I wonder if this latest 'issue' they're having is what's been causing her current and previous problems. Anyway I think we'll hold fire on anything else until this fault is officially resolved, after which we'll follow your advice if she has further issues and report back here.

Many thanks!