Sudden loss of landline phone.

[HHGTTG]

This morning I had to make a phone call early to EDF and this went OK. About 10am I went to use the phone again and the DECT phone display said 'Line cord error' so no go. I went to have a look at my old style phone on the hall table plugged sort of directly into the master socket via a ADSL filter and the digital display on that was blank. So zero phone supply to the house.

Needless to say I have reported this to BT and they eventually said that this is a network fault and the engineers should have it back and running my Monday 23rd Feb. Despite this my ADSL internet is working but I now see at a reduced speed, dropping from 19+Mbps to about 13Mbps. 

If I dial my landline number from my mobile phone it keeps on dialling and then my SH 2 starts blinking as if it has lost connection. After a few seconds it goes back blue. Clearly phoning home now upsets my Broadband albeit only for a short time.

I don't know what BT mean by a network problem rather than trouble at my local exchange (less the 0.5 mile away) or or connection at or from the telephone pole opposite my house.

Any comments would be welcome. 

[iniltous]

Presumably you are not yet migrated to Digital Voice ,

ADSL/VDSL can be a little odd in a way , that a disconnection of 1 leg of the copper pair close to the property , knocks off the PSTN telephony  (as that requires both legs of the copper pair , to make a ‘loop’ ) but doesn’t necessarily knock off the broadband, which continues to work , albeit more slowly, over the one leg of the copper pair still connected to the router ….DV in a  situation like this continues to work ( so much for the anti DV brigade that complain that PSTN is superior and more resilient ) .

FWIW , I had a problem recently, broadband working , as was DV , but at approximately half the normal download speed , I carried out a  line test (via MY BT ) which detected a problem externally, and was automatically reported to Openreach , the tech turned up ( after 1 day if I remember correctly) and fixed the issue , it turned out my connection was  ‘dis 1 leg’ in the cabinet, they day before I realised my broadband was slow , I’d noticed an Openreach tech working in the cabinet, that tech presumably inadvertently disturbed my connection while working on an adjacent one ….the fault noticed , reported and fixed in less that 48 hours .

[HHGTTG]

Yes I am still on ADSL. BT spent most of 2025 sending me messages about the change and I kept on cancelling the upgrade to Home Essentials BB and DV. Strangely this year I have heard nothing from them. Anyway in MyBT my fault is logged and trackable and hopefully the landline will be fixed before Monday. Funnily I had email/text telling me that they've cancelled an engineer's visit (did not know there was going to one) as it was that Network problem. I don't whether I need to be at home all the time or what.

[HHGTTG · Accepted solution]

Well you were right. An Openreach engineer turned up unannounced at 4-30pm and told me he'd been at the local exchange whereupon he found that my wires had been fiddled with and one had been disconnected. It was during this time and before he came to my house that the phone started working again. He did some more standard line tests and generally messed around and checked my equipment and now everything is fully funtional.
So success and repair within the working day.