Yesterday my answering machine picked up without my home phone ringing. The machine played the first few seconds of my greeting, then hung up. I picked up the phone and there was no dial tone.
I called my home phone from my cell phone, and sure enough, the same thing happened.
I then used my cell to call my home phone’s repair service. I got a completely automated dialogue, including a step that said “we’re testing your phone, please wait”. At the end of the call, the dialogue said the problem would be fixed by 8 PM the next day.
A couple of hours after the call, I checked my phone, and it was working fine.
So what happened? What was wrong and how did they fix it?
I’m guessing some signal in my line was very weak, and my answering machine picked it up perhaps because it’s more sensitive than my phone.
Something similar happened a number of years ago when I was living elsewhere, except that I didn’t have an answering machine at the time.
Years ago, my lil brother aquired a large box filled with telephones. He went to our parents’ home and installed a phone in every room, partially as a gag, partially for convenience. The downside was that the phones would not ring. As he removed phones one at a time, eventually he got to the point where there was a muted ring. Removing a couple more phones gave a louder ring.
How many phones and answering machines do you have? If there’s more than (typically) five on the line, the combined load can result in weak ringing or no ringing. Otherwise, a bad connection in the wiring can cause the same problem. The trick with that is finding said bad connection.
The anwering machine senses the 90 volt ringing signal electronically, so it’ll have no problem detecting an attempted ring, even if the signal’s not enough to activate regular phones. So yes, your guess about sensitivity’s pretty much spot-on.
As for what the phone company did, they might have goosed up the ringing power on your line, based on their test results when you called them. If the problem returns or persists, they’ll probably “ring out” your line to try finding the location of the fault - the testing will say “bad connection at 10,300 feet” or similar, and they check on the wiring maps to find roughly where 10,300 feet away along your line is - most likely a streetside splice cabinet or a pole-mounted connection near your home.
I can only guess that a service man was working on the lines and when he finished your service was restored to normal.
The old Western Electric phones required a ringing voltage & current. Had the ringers been disconnected in all but two or three phones, at most, the system would have worked.
I have 2 phones and 1 answering machine. I checked the ringer equivalence numbers, and the phones are both 1, the machine is .5. At the time of the previous incident I had just one phone (one of the two I now have) and no answering machine.
To someone like me who doesn’t know what’s involved, it’s kind of mind-boggling that the problem was detected and fixed so quickly without my talking to a human being.
Over the years, Bell Labs has developed some amazingly clever equipment. Sometimes it’s all but self-maintaining, and sometimes it just needs a gentle nudge to alert it to a problem.
Your REN of 2.5 should not be a problem for a phone line unless you’re five miles away from the phone company’s switching office.