Home phone line busy

[sharky]

I have been finding quite a lot lately that when I try to call my home number (have a FFL ATA phone) from my cell phone I get a busy signal. With v-mail FFL should never give a busy signal - even so I have been home many times and know that no-one is on the phone.

What is causing these busy signals? It is hard to replicate - when it happens it seem for an evening the line is busy 9 out of 10 times I call, then one goes through and I get a ring.

Outgoing calls always work.

It is very anonying to hear from friends that they couldn't get through to me because my phone was always busy during an evening - when even if I am on the phone (which I am not) they should be getting voicemail?

It is happening tonight again - no inbound calling to my number (289-633-XXXX) between 5:30-now (8:20PM). Tried rebooting the ATA and the Internet connection, no luck.

[TheHardy]

I don't have a FPL ATA, but here is a troubleshooting suggestion, when you find this to be the case.

Disconnect the ATA so that it is not active (or log out, whatever), and try loading the default FPL SOFTPHONE application -- see if the inbound calls correctly go thru then, or if they still hit a busy signal.

By no means is this a technical solution, but it should help you somewhat in isolating the problem perhaps.

I would suggest that you keep a detailed list of WHEN your line is showing busy, and then contact FPL directly via phone or email to customer support, with all the relevant information and have them track it down for you that way.

[sharky]

Thanks -

I did actually try that tonight (before posting the above message) as part of my troubleshooting. I unplugged the ATA, and logged into the soft-client. It didn't make a difference, I dialed and received several busy for every one successful ring through.

I hate calling the call centers, as I usually get reps asking me to reset boxes - and troubleshooting a phone line from a phone line is troublesome at best.

I still love the service (can't beat the price!) - and this doesn't happen all that often, just when it does it is quite anonying.

[TheHardy]

If the problem is the same with both the ATA and the softphone, then it would seem to narrow it down to a network problem on the FPL side, no?

I can understand your reluctance to deal with call-centre reps, but unfortunately, I don't think that there is a solution for you other than this.

Is there any "pattern" to the callers that receive the BUSY signal? IE: all calling from Bell mobile phones, or all calling from Rogers mobiles, or anything like that?

Just curious... sorry that I have not been able to provide any useful info!

[sharky]

All my "testing" is done from a TELUS cell phone, the busy signal is too sporatic to figure anything else out. Test called again this morning and it seems to be working OK.

I have another number with a softphone, so the next time I encounter the situation I will try calling from one FFL to another and see what happens.