I’m in the UK. Our building has a single telephone line with extensions in various rooms. One thing I hate is when I’m on the phone with someone and someone else in the building picks up an extension and starts dialling out. Another thing I hate is when I answer the phone in one room which is very loud, and so want to take the call at another extension. There’s no way of doing this short of putting down the phone, walking to another extension, picking it up, walking back to the first extension, putting the phone back on the hook, and finally walking back to the second extension to take the call.
Back when I lived in North Amercia, pretty much every decent phone manufactured in the last ten years had two very useful features to combat the above problems: 1) a visual “line in use” indicator, and 2) a “call hold” button. The former was a light that went on whenever another extension was in use. The latter, when pressed, muted the line and let you put the phone back on the hook. You could then pick up another extension (or the same one) and continue the call.
I’ve been looking through various office equipment/consumer electronics catalogues here and to my surprise none of the telephones for sale have either of these features. I even called the local telephone provider, BT, who told me that such telephones simply do not exist, and that if I wanted in-use indicators and call hold functionality, I would need to buy a PBX system.
So my questions are as follows: is there any technical reason why it’s not possible for British telephones to have in-use lights and hold buttons? If not, why can’t I find anyone selling such phones? Finally, can I buy a phone from North America that has these features and use it in the UK (provided I get an adaptor for the plug)?
Don’t know about #1 but you can just say, “I’m putting the receiver down, don’t go away”, put the phone straight down on the hook, then coninue on another extension fine as long as they called you.
None of my phones at home have hold or line in use indicators.
The only phones I ever had at home that had those features were SOHO (small office / home office) two-line phones that I had back in the day before DSL, and we had two lines - one for talking and one for modems.
You can put the phone back on the cradle, and you have about 40sec to pick it up again on another extension without losing the call (when you are the called party), because the connection is only broken straightaway when the calling party’s phone sends the CSC [Calling Subscriber Cleardown] signal.
Probably the same reason as most things that don’t make it over here, we just don’t see the need for it.
I’m going out on a limb here so other UK dopers pitch in and disagree if you wish, but i think that even today most UK homes really only have one land line phone that actually gets used much. Lot’s of people have extensions in the bedroom but hardly use them. I’d say it’s pretty much SOP in the UK to have your phone in the hall and everyone makes/takes call there. I’ll go out even further on a limb and bet that most UK dopers can relate to sitting on the bottom of the stairs taking their calls, am i right?
Obviously things are different in bigger houses but for the rest of us little people…
BTW - I think there are phones in the UK, possibly just cordless ones though, that do both of those things. Half of the ones that do probably don’t even list it as a ‘feature’ though so probably why you can’t seem to find them.
Mostly what rocksolid says, although I’d suggest it’s far more common to have a cordless phone now, but with a single handset - shouting “who’s got the bloody phone” works fine as an in-use on-hold system.
I agree; unless an Englishman actually has a castle (or a mansion), most of our houses are small enough to shout “oy” if someone’s already using the line.
We live in a large-ish house and have currently two standard (tied) phones and three dect phones. None have an “in-use” indicator but I have had such phones in the past although I haven’t seen any in recent years - I think they were actually American and came with dire warnings about them possibly wrecking the UK phone network but they seemed to be OK. Worth keeping in mind though. If bringing phones from America, you would mostly likely only have to change the lead. These are mostly plug in, modem-like leads now and very simple to change. Don’t use a modem lead though, the connection configuration is different.
Our dect phones also have the capability to be used internally (intercom) and to transfer calls between handsets. One day someone will work out how to do this instead of having to run all over the house looking for the intended recipient of an incoming call and handing them the handset and nicking theirs.
Or do as I do and never answer the phone unless you know who is calling and sometimes not then either.
A slight hijack of the thread here too.
Does anyone know of a landline phone that has voice control. This is for someone who has very poor vision and has great difficulty dialing calls or even using the quick dial option.
I don’t see anything in the features list that is unambiguously an in-use indicator or a call hold button. There is a feature called “FWD”; could that be call hold? There is also a feature called “Message ringer lamp”, though the way it’s worded I expect the lamp lights up only when the phone is ringing, or when there are new voicemail (1571) messages.