The Silence of the Phones

[mamadeb]

For some reason, all of our phone lines are down. There is no outgoing dial tone, and incoming calls get static. The single exception is, of course, the DSL line.

And my employer can't figure this out. I tried to explain (and I hope I'm right. If I'm wrong, please tell me.) that the dsl line is always open - that there is a continous signal in both directions so it could not be interrupted. As an example, and it's a good one - we were receiving a fax at the moment the phone lines died, and we continued to recieve it as the lines died, but were not able to send an outgoing fax at that same time. They say it could have been in memory, and that's a possiblity, given that the last page may be missing.

So. What would be the reason we can have DSL while all the other phone lines, all going through the same junction box, have failed?

Comments

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

DSL is a dedicated line. The others go through a different switch. Hence the one can go down when the others don't, or vice versa.

Hoping everything works itself out.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That makes sense.

[sraun]

I've had the exact same thing happen to me - and I got something like a third of my monthly phone bill reimbursed because of it.

I called - using my neighbor's phone! - at something like 7:30 on a Friday to report that I had no residential dial-tone. I still had DSL service on the same line - just no dial-tone. I got to talk to phone people (first-line) several times on Saturday - I had friends over, I got to borrow one of their cell-phones. One of the nice people I talked to told me that the service tech had flagged the call 'Home DSL - no work on weekends'. As near as I could figure out after the fact, I got dial-tone back about 10AM Monday - so I had no residential service for 2.5 days. On Tuesday, I mailed a letter to the President of QWest (maybe it was Northwestern Bell at the time), with copies to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission and the office in Arizona (or wherever it was) that the phone answering people were.

I got a credit for the 'over 24 hours' that I was out of service, and an additional $5-10. I did not get told that they had fixed their procedures - but if it ever happens again, I'm going to insist that the ticket get written up as 'No Residential DIAL-TONE' - accent the 'DIAL-TONE'! And when it doesn't get fixed over the weekend, I'm sending mail off bright and early Monday morning.