My parents have had static on their phones for the past two days. They called Verizon for service and it $97 for the call if the problem is inside the house.
Today I started doing some diagnosing for them to try and isolate the problem. I looked at the consumer side of the NID. It looks dirty in there. Both jacks have jumpers plugged in. The phone all go dead when I pull the bottom jack.
Plugging a wired phone into that bottom jack gives a pure clean dialtone with no static so I believe this means the problem is inside the house.
I have unplugged all 4 phones from their jacks and tested each jack with the same wired phone with the following results
Could be that the connector on the cable that goes from the NID to the house is bad. They’re pretty easy to replace, so it’s probably worth trying before calling Verizon. Also, I’d open up each jack in the house and check the connections inside. Again, easy to do. Make sure all the connections are clean, tight, etc.
Connecting points are the most likely place for something to go bad. Unless something has happened to the cable (animal chewing it, staple driven into it, water getting inside, etc.), it’s not very common for it to suddenly go bad in the middle of a run. If the cables are accessible (e.g. in a crawlspace), you could trace it and try to find any other connections or potential problem points. Of course, if it’s accessible, you could also just replace it yourself…
I had a problem like this, and they were right, it was in my house and I paid the $100 as a result.
Don’t know if this will be any help to you but at my place the problem was that we had a room drywalled (renovations) and had a phone line run but not connected, in case we wanted it in the future.
He had just pushed the wires into the box and covered it with a plate. But without maurets to cover the ends of the wires, one had wiggled free and was touching the metal casing of the box.
This was what was causing the static on the line. $100 lesson learned.
Not sure it will help just thought I’d share. (Also desperately trying to get value for $100 spent!)
Thank you all for your replies. I will be looking to hire someone to do this. I don’t have time during daylight hours to work on it and my parents don’t want to try anything themselves.
They say it got worse after they asked Verizon to test the line
It’s all one big parallel circuit. If it got worse after the line was tested then start with the junction box. Clean/reinstall the primary connections and then repeat with each line. Before you reconnect each outlet try the other phones to see if there is something wrong with one of the lines.
So have them go to Radio Shack or similar, buy a 50 or 100 foot phone extension cable, plug that in inside the NID, run it to a kitchen or living room central location, and plug a phone into it. Then that phone will be usable * free of static, but the other ones in the house will be dead. But they ought to be able to live with that until you get there on the weekend.
Proper connectors for phone wiring are these things. You put the unstripped wires into the slot, squeeze the colored puck with pliers and two things happen internally - teeth bite into the wires to make the connection, and gel seals the connection to prevent corrosion.
Wire nuts don’t provide the corrosion prevention and will cause problems pretty quickly. The gel-filled crunch-on connectors are a lifetime solution from the days when Ma Bell would install something and then be responsible for keeping it working eternally.
Update Verizon sent someone out today before I could do anything. According to my father the checked the box and found it was corroded so they replaced it no cost.
I’m assuming he meant the interface on the side of the house was corroded and they replaced it