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Message 1 of 15

Intermittent Crackling Faults on Elderly Parents Phone Line

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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

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Message 2 of 15

Re: Intermittent Crackling Faults on Elderly Parents Phone Line

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@Lars_Porsena 

I have asked a moderator to assist.

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Message 3 of 15

Re: Intermittent Crackling Faults on Elderly Parents Phone Line

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@Keith_Beddoe -- Thank you so much, that is an enormous relief to me.
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Message 4 of 15

Re: Intermittent Crackling Faults on Elderly Parents Phone Line

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Hi @Lars_Porsena,

Thank you for posting and welcome to the Community. I'm sorry if you haven't been able to get your Father's telephone service repaired. The nature of a intermittent fault can mean that its difficult to identify and fix the cause of the fault.

The Covid restriction  around Care Homes and extremely vulnerable would have also complicated things and delayed the service from being repaired. If you send me your Father's account details. I'll be able to run a few checks on the line and help you get the service repaired.

I have sent you a private message with instructions on how to contact the team.  You can access your messages via the envelope icon at the top right of the screen, or click on this link, Private messages

Thanks,

Paddy

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Message 5 of 15

Re: Intermittent Crackling Faults on Elderly Parents Phone Line

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Thank you Paddy, I have sent the details you have asked for.
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Message 6 of 15

Re: Intermittent Crackling Faults on Elderly Parents Phone Line

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I have heard nothing further since  the last message.  @PaddyB referred to 'the team' in his message, and I replied to his private message supplying all of the details requested.

No one has been in touch, and I am not aware of any action being taken.  I spoke to my father yesterday on his 99th birthday, and for the first part of the call the line was clear, but about 7 minutes into  it the  crackling  resumedmaing clear communication difficult and cutting the call shorter than I would have liked.

It would be helpful to me if someone would explain what is supposed to happen when a cry for help is picked up from this forum.  Who is the team who are dealing with this, what are they doing and what is a reasonable time scale for me to expect updates and progress with this?   I was encouraged by the very prompt initial response to my post, and do not know (though lack of communication from the team) what, if anything, is being done in response to my last message.

Is somebody able to clarify this for me please?  Thank you.

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Message 7 of 15

Re: Intermittent Crackling Faults on Elderly Parents Phone Line

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I have asked mods to help



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Message 8 of 15

Re: Intermittent Crackling Faults on Elderly Parents Phone Line

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Hi @Lars_Porsena  sorry that we've not been in touch yet. I've checked and one of the team will be in touch with you within the next 24hrs.

cheers

John

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Message 9 of 15

Re: Intermittent Crackling Faults on Elderly Parents Phone Line

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Thank you @JohnC2 

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Message 10 of 15

Re: Intermittent Crackling Faults on Elderly Parents Phone Line

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I would like to say thank you to the  contributors and moderators, especially moderator NeilO who have been helping me during past few weeks.  Getting access to my father'sroom has been difficult, but I have installed a new phone for him and followed advice from  NeilO who  helped me test the socket without having to call out BT engineers again.  Neil has stayed in touch regularly and followed up with me to ensure that a solution was found.