Phone line fault

[#1]

My phone line has a fault: no dial tone (corded phone on the master socket), plus people dialling the number get a message saying the phone is in use. Broadband is fine.

I've tried logging into PlusNet numerous times, but most of the the time I get a message saying "service unavailable". When I do manage to log in, navigating through to the Phone Troubleshooter page is also plagued by "service unavailable" messages. And on the one occasion I did manage to get the Phone Troubleshooter page to work, it returned this:

Your phone line check is now complete Here are the results

The result of your line check is unclear.

Please wait a while and try the test again.


I was then directed back to the Phone Troubleshooter–and it failed again due to "service unavailable". So much for award winning service!

[#2]

My wife finally managed to find an actual person to interact with in PlusNet's support team, but only by using Facebook. Their response was that the problem must be internal and therefore not a PlusNet/BT problem. However, even when I plugged a corded phone into the test socket (with the faceplate removed), the problem persisted: suggesting the problem was in fact on the PlusNet/BT side of things. In the end, I couldn't be arsed to spend more time trying to get PlusNet to act so I bought a new BT NTE5C + VDSL Master Socket, removed the old NTE master socket and fitted the new one, taking care to note and match the cable colour coding. Problem solved. And yes, I probably shouldn't have replaced the master socket but if I can't persuade anyone at PlusNet to do something, then I'm not going to sit around and wait for the phone line to magically repair itself. (The only thing keeping me with PlusNet is that I've been with other ISPs/telecoms provider and they're all [-Censored-]–the exceptions being those that are even more [-Censored-]!)