My father is 98 years old and is living in a care home. During the past 12-18 months his phone line has been plagued by intermittent but frequent crackling which renders conversation impossible.
The following steps have been tried in attempts to resolve the issues:-
I have tested his phone (a cordless model) on my own land line and found it to be working normally.
I have renewed to hand set.
The Care Home have provided an alternative plug-in phone
The Care Home have reported the fault and BT engineers have been out twice. On the first occasion no fault was found and a fee had to be paid. On the second occasion I understand that a fault was found and there was some improvement in the quality of calls for a short while.
Until recently it was not possible to visit him in his room, but today I was given access for the purpose of testing his line to the best of my ability. Two phones are connected to his phone point via a splitter, his cordless phone and the plug-in phone provided by the Home. By dialling 17070 I was able to confirm that the line crackles on both phones.
The problem here can be summarised as follows:-
This is a vulnerable BT customer, who has been a BT customer for the whole of his life. He no longer has capacity to solve this problem for himself, the care home staff have no expertise in telephones, no personal visits have been possible to his room until recently and now they are restricted. He is reliant on his telephone to keep in contact with friends and family, but has been unable to do so because of the poor quality of many of his phone calls – both incoming and outgoing. Nobody is taking responsibility to find a solution and a consequence his quality of life and his mental health have been severely impacted.
I would like to be able to communicate directly with a representative of BT who can advise me any actions that I can take to rule out problems with his equipment, and to co-ordinate with BT engineers to track down and resolve the line fault if that is the cause of the crackling. Because this is an intermittent fault, there needs to be a commitment to stay with this problem until it is resolved.
I have seen on another thread with another customer who experienced similar problems with crackling intermittent line faults with aged parents, and in that instance a Moderator took the necessary initiatives and saw the matter through until the line fault had been identified and rectified.
I have tried everything that I can think of to try and resolve this, but the problems remain and I am at my wits end.
My thanks to anyone who reads this and is able to help in any way possible
