It's best not to anger The Phone Company.........................
Posted on 08/30/2012 9:38:55 AM PDT by texas_mrs
For some time now I have been complaining to my parents that I really DID try to call them on the weekend (I work for them at the office on their ranch during the week) to check on them, but couldn't get through. I often get a recording saying the phone number is no longer a working number, thought they've had the same number for decades. Now we've noticed the office is as quiet as a tomb and people are calling our cells saying they can't get through and faxes are not always being received. I called the local company to complain & they suggested we call the FCC to lodge a complaint, that "advanced networks which are used to carry the majority of calls between large cities can sometimes create software interconnection issues that could affect call routing, especially if the advanced networkds do not have their own directly connected circuits but hand off to another long distance carrier. This scenario is prevalent and most common to rural areas. The FCC is aware of this issue and had demanded carriers have a network in place that can handled all calls with quality."
They then go on to suggest you file a complaint with the FCC, which I have filed several.
My question is, do any of you have a suggestion how we might get around this problem in the interim? One idea is to switch to Vonage to route our calls through the internet, not sure how that would work or if this can work for the fax. At any rate, we could lose business because of people getting the message our number is no longer in service! Fortunately, we just got several contracts (we build highways), but if a letting comes up we want to bid in, we may not be ready for it.
Port your numbers to cell phones. Get an internet fax account and port your fax number there.
Switch to a VOIP carrier.
You can handle the faxes like this:
Any of the VOIP services will do fax flawlessly.
As for Vonage, it’s getting entrenched and lazy. It’s too expensive at $25/mo.
PhonePower and MagicJack offer the same level of service for 1/3 of the price. PhonePower will even give you a 2 line phone system free. You can be talking on the phone and receive or send calls with the other (same phone number) line.
It's best not to anger The Phone Company.........................
Seriously, you need to contact your local exchange carrier, or LEC. In other words, the company that sends you a bill for local service at that location.
Call their customer service number and make it THEIR problem. They are responsible for terminating a valid dial stream (a good 7, 10 or 11 digit number) AT your address, to the network interface on the side of your building.
THEY, not you, are REQUIRED to complete calls - originating and terminating - at your address if they BILL you for landline service.
If you pay for landline service, THEY have to make it work.
*IF* your problem is that ‘long distance’ calls won’t go through, then follow the above process with your INTER-exchange carrier otherwise known as the long distance company named on your phone bill.
**IF** you do not get satisfaction with them, then call the Texas public service commission as well as the FCC. The PSC (or whatever it is called in TX) LOVES to hear from people who have issues with the phone company.
Thanks guys! I will start checking into these ideas right away!
Use cell phones
It handles faxes.
Sounds like you have a short on the cable pair either coming into your protector or the inside wiring. When you have a short on your telephone line, when you pickup your receiver you will have a dead line or a hum, no dial tone. This prevents you from making or receiving calls.
Quick check. Unplug a phone that you know works, take the phone outside and find the protector on your building (it is usually a gray plastic box 6x8 inches.) Open the box and disconnect or unplug the inside wire jumper. Now you can test to see if the line coming in to your building has dialtone by plugging in the phone you brought out. If you have dialtone your problem is the wiring inside which is usually a shorted jack. If you still don’t get dialtone the problem is coming into your property and is a phone company problem.
My daughter was having the same problem with the phone of the people that she was working for. She over slept one day and tried to call and warn them, and couldn’t get any answer. They said that other family members have told them the same thing. I think that someone at the house was either intentionally or accidentally turning off the ringer.
hi rider seems to have experience as a phone man. That’s good. If you are getting a disconnect message when calling in then someone called in to disconnect the #. If you are getting your service from the local(Bell) provider that should be the case. If you have a dial tone, can dial out, but not receive calls then you have someone else’s phone working in your home. Third, you should be able test your line automatically from a cell phone by calling repairs(611?) and following the call tree instructions. This info should be in the front of the white section in the phone book. Last, there is no reason that local company cannot call-forward your incoming calls to a cell phone temporarily.
I still work for ATT but have no land line-not worth it. Uverse rocks!
If you get your service from a different provider all bets are off.
I don’t see why anybody should be surprised.
More and more people are disconnecting from land lines, plus the local phone companies now get little if any income from long distance calls.
Yet they must still maintain essentially the same infrastructure as during the days when the phone company was a profitable monopoly.
Reduced income - same expenses = reduced quality of service. Something has to give.
We lived in a community in the Bradshaw mountains near Prescott, AZ. The only service that worked there was Alltel. When Verizon bought out Alltel, we didn’t get ANY service what so ever. The FCC made Verizon shut down the cell tower that serviced our area, for some reason. We had to drive several miles down the road to call Verizon to complain. We couldn’t call our next door neighbor or even get through to 911. At first, they said it was our phones. They had us jumping through hoops for several weeks before they admitted they knew the source of the problem.
For several more months, we fought with Verizon. One resident, who worked for the county in communications, convinced Verizon to send out an engineer, who agreed we weren’t getting any service. He said they’d get it too us. Eventually. It would take maybe up to a year to get the problem corrected. Other people contacted legislators, corporation commission, etc. and got the same answer.
After getting no where for a long time, I wrote a letter to Verizon and told them about the man who had a quad accident near our house. He had to be air lifted out. He has suffered massive facial injuries and possible head injuries. He was barely conscious while we were tending too him and went went into a coma on his way down to Phoenix. He survived, but barely.
Since emergency services were at least 1/2 hour away, residents of the community had to act as first responders. In this case, it was my self and my husband. We could no longer contact 911 from the spot where I’d called during that accident. In fact, we would have had to leave the victim in the road while we drove around searching for a signal. I informed Verizon that if similar accident occurred, we would make sure the victim’s attorneys were well aware of our attempts to correct the problems with our phone service.
I received no response from the letter, and I don’t know if it made a difference, but we had cell service again about two weeks after my letter was mailed.
i’d hazard a guess that your problem is inside your building. your building phone support should be your first contact.
Sometimes VOIP carriers do not play nice with one another.
There are certain numbers I try to call from my office where the call never gets through. I just get these recordings.
Turns out we and they are on different VOIP carriers which apparently don’t work well together. I don’t understand why, only that I have no problems calling the same people from my cell phone.
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