After years of not being in contact with someone on Long Island, I tried to call them this week to catch up. I tried their number a few times since Monday and keep getting “Your call did not go through. Please try later”.
Now, that would indicate that the call did not go through and I should try later.
But this has been going on since Monday. My first thought was that phone service may have been knocked out by Irene, but google doesn’t indicate anything amiss that way.
Called directory assistance, and as far as they are concerned, the line is live.
Any further suggestions or explanation for why this would be happening would be welcome.
If they have phone service over cable (like I do ) perhaps they lost cable and knocked out their phone service. The phone service in general might be fine in that area, but the voice over cable might be affected.
Most landline phones require electiricty, so just because the phone line is intact doesn’t mean it rings through. The local news last night said there were still 270,000 customers on Long Island without power, and I’m sure that’s the issue with reaching your friend.
Not really true, unless you are talking about wireless sets or the voice-message function - but otherwise standard wired land-line phones should work fine even without outside electricity.
Actually, it’s just the opposite. A landline phone gets power over the phone line from the central office, so it will work even if there is no electricity in the house.
This is assuming a standard corded phone. If it’s cordless, then it won’t work without power to the base station, buit in that case you wouldn’t get the “Your call did not go through” message, it would just keep ringing or go to voice mail.
I agree with Ivory Tower Denizon. If their phone service is from the cable company, or if they use some other VOIP service like Vonage, they may be without service even if the landlines in the area are fine.
ETA: I need to learn to type faster. Sorry for the simulpost.
I’ve gotten that message from cell phone users who weren’t in a area with signal, or who had their phones turned off. The OP doesn’t specify whether it’s a cell phone or land line. If the electricity is off, they may have turned off their phones to save their battery for emergencies.
There are several places in the network where the failure could occur.
One possibility is that the particular carrier you are using could be having connectivity problems.
To force your call to go over a different carrier, try this FROM A LANDLINE PHONE:
Dial 10-10-345 before the number. This will route your call over AT&T. If it is answered the charge will be 30 cents plus 5 cents per minute for interstate calls or 30 cents plus 10 cents per minute for calls within New York.
If that doesn’t work, dial 10-10-220 before the number. This will route your call over MCI/Verizon. If the call is answered the charge is $1.20 for the first 10 minutes and 20 cents for each additional minute.
For example, if you would normally dial, 1-212-555-0123, dial
1010345-1-212-555-0123
or
1010220-1-212-555-0123
(Note there will be no pause or new dial tone after the 10-10-xxx, just keep dialing the digits.)
Note that I am not recommending using either of these services on a regular basis, just as a one-time test to see if you can get through. If you can, we can discuss where to buy a cheaper calling card and how to do this via a mobile phone. Don’t worry, you won’t do any permanent damage to your phone and there will be no charge if you can’t get through.
FWIW, that’s the message people get at the moment when they call my home land line number. I live in the NYC Metro area and use Cablevision for telephone service, internet, and of course cable television. All of them have been out the last few days due to the hurricane.
Lucky Dog Phone Company IS AT&T.
Back in the days when MCI, AT&T, and Sprint were all actively competing for your landline long distance business, they developed various billing gimmicks so that they could advertise discount long distance service without eating into the profit margins of their regular sucker long distance.
To facilitate this, they grabbed many different Carrier Identification Codes. AT&T has a few dozen codes. Then they advertised different rates for people who dialed different codes.
MCI had the most famous code 10-10-321. The one that advertised 50% off AT&T rates for calls over 20 minutes (later 10 minutes). When they got people in the habit of dialing 10-10-321, they quietly raised the rates and then started advertising 10-10-220 and then 10-10-987. All of these numbers were advertised as being served by TelecomUSA. TelecomUSA is a subsidiary of MCI.
Lucky Dog Phone Company was a dba that AT&T set up to compete with the Telecom*USA services. Their original gimmick was that every nth caller would get some kind of prize, hence the name they used for the service was Lucky Dog Phone Company.
288 is the identification code AT&T uses for pre-subscribed lines. If you do not have an AT&T calling plan and call using that code, they will bill you several dollars a minute plus a non-subscriber access charge plus a regulatory fee plus tax. You do not want to dial 10-10-288 if you don’t have an AT&T calling plan. But you can call 10-10-345 and still get AT&T and pay a reasonable fee. It’s just a gimmick.
Possibly related, possibly wrong, possibly an abuse of terminology:
When we were getting DSL installed as a backup for our cable Internet connection (home business with global clients; we need the redundancy), one of the things I asked about was power outages. Having moved out of the City (thanks Interent!) to somewhat rural New York, we’ve faced occasional outages.
I knew that when the power goes down it takes our cable-based VOIP with it. To call in the outage and get an estimate, we use a land-line, non-cordless phone. It, as mentioned upthread, is powered by the phone company. What about the DSL line?
The techs said that the phone company no longer energizes the entire system. Our service would remain active as long as the batteries in the closest substation lasted.
We lost power during Irene. Our land-line worked well after the storm passed. When turning the UPS the DSL modem, router, and VOIP box were plugged into, we were able to make VOIP calls. However, about 20-24 hours after the storm–while power was still down–the land-line (and DSL) went dead. Both came up in tandem with power being restored.
TL;DR: We were told that the phone’s independence from the power company was based on batteries, not power flowing from the phone company over all phone lines. This was supported by a recent anecdote that may be illusionary.
Yes, there are batteries at the local telephone exchange. These are used to send DC voltage down the phone line to power what is called POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). This will run your corded phone and the ringer circuits. That’s why you can use a corded landline phone when the power in your house is out.
However, the switching circuits that route calls, as well as DSL and other features (caller ID, call forwarding, etc) are dependent on the exchange having power, so if that goes offline, nothing will work.
ETA: I’m sure most exchange offices have some kind of backup generator that will keep power going for some period of time after an outage.
In the traditional set up, your phone line would run all the way back to the telco Central Office (CO). The CO would be powered by the local power company, but all power would run through batteries, much like your alternator recharges your car battery which runs your car. If the local power company cut out, a local generator would kick in. When the generator ran out of gas (or it didn’t work), the batteries could still keep the system up and going for a while. When the local power cut out, the generator ran out of gas, and the batteries ran down, you were SOL.
Now, instead of running lines directly back to the CO, it’s more and more common to run them to concentrators that may be on a pole somewhere. Those concentrators need to be powered. There isn’t room for a big honking bank of batteries like you’d find at a CO nor for a backup generator.
Thank you everyone. I’ll give it a go in a couple of days, then. It’s been interesting to see where the vulnerabilities are in what is assumed to be a rock-solid infrastructure.
