I am facing a baffling problem. I have a corded and a cordless phone hooked in my apartment along with AT&T DSL internet on the same phone line.
Few days back my 900Mhz Uniden cordless phone stopped ringing whenever there used to be incoming call. My corded phone continue to ring and I could even use either phones to answer the calls. There was no problem for outging calls also from either phones. Some times for incoming calls the corded phone use to ring only once and gets directly connected. I picked any of the phones I could answer the call.
I thought it could be a problem with the Uniden phone and purchased a
2.4Ghz GE phone. It also behaved exactly the same way. Both the cordless phones have answering system, which is also not working. I checked GE and Uniden cordless phones at my friends place along with all the DSL filters. Surprisingly the phones and answering system worked just fine.Now I felt the problem is with my telephone service / Line. I got it checked from At&T and they informed me the line is ok. He mentioned it could be due to "Interference" with wireless network. I tried using the phones without DSL and without wireless routers. Things did not change. Now I am wondering if wireless networks in my apartment vicinity (there are several of them) are interfering with my cordless system? Can any body explain the phenomenon and the way to solve it?
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The first thing which came to mind was not that there was 'interference'. If there was 'interference', you would occassionally hear 'static' or something similar on the line when you were using it. Also, you would probably receive spurious ringing (no rhyme nor reason to it; just occassional tingles from the ring-making device on the cordless phone) when the 'interference' bothered the cordless unit. Before you go around polling your neighbors to see about their cordless phones and wireless apparatus, I would first go by the clues you gave in your first paragraph: (1) You recently got AT&T DSL service. and (2) the cordless phone only rang _once_ and was directly connected. That 'one ring and then connected' sort of sounds ot me like a short on the line. Not enough of a short to make your line totally busy but enough of a short that with sufficient ringing voltage (as oppposed to voltage to talk with) something is happening.I'd try unplugging all the phones and the DSL incoming line. Then do a controlled test where you place a call to yourself (maybe from a cell phone?) with _only_ the wireless phone plugged in where you normally have the wired phone plugged in. See if your wireless phone and its answering machine now start working, or see if you can make the cordless phone 'ring once' and then be connected. If it does work okay at that point, then the hassle is in the wiring of one or more of your phone outlets. I suggest that in most cases with wireless phones and answering machines, only two wires are used; for simplicity, the red and the green. But sometimes, on cordless phones and answering machines the outside pair (yellow and black wires number 1 and 4) are also used. Is your answering machine set up to cut off whenever a phone is picked up? If that is the case, then sometimes the yelllow/black wires 1 & 4 are 'jumpered' to green and red (wires 2 &
3) inside the phone somehow or _maybe_ in the wall box. After you do these litle experiments I suggested, get back to us here and _carefully_ document what happened. PAT]