Phone crackles and hisses

Hi everyone, I have a problem which I would appreciate any contributions to help.

When I make a voice call on my corded landline, I notice that the line hisses and crackles, which can vary from faint to really quite loud, but it is always there. I have tried a number of remedies, including:

- plugging my corded phone into the test socket on the main BT phone socket - no hissing
- changed all the adsl filters in the flat - still hissing
- bought a new router - still hissing

But...I have noticed that when I unplugged the router, the hissing stopped (hence I bought a new router as I thought the old one had had it). It is really bugging me. So in a nut shell the phone line is crystal when there is no router plugged in, but when it is it hisses. My ISP is Virgin Media.

Any help much appreciated.

THanks
Greg

There is a good chance you have a high resistance line fault. What happens if you use the router connected in the test socket and then try the phone through the filter ? If it's hissing now, then yes, you have an HR fault. The difficulty is getting your ISP to get an engineer out, if you try and do this via your voice provider there's a good chance you'll have an engineer come out and say it's your kit and charge you. Do you find that using the phone interferes with your broadband connection ?

Doesn't the automated tester check for HR faults now?

Could well be a HR fault, you could report it as a voice(PTSN) fault your self to who ever you pay line rental to,But if you do do NOT mention Broadband or routers, should you be able to hear any noise during the Quite line test apart from the recored announcement there should be no noise present (17070 option 2) for quiet test
The fact that you are able to hear noise when the router is connected, you will almost certainly get the runaround by the isp ,telling you that it's a voice fault and not an ADSL fault and to contact your telephony provider about it, you can easily end up in a loop with buck passing and no progress being made , as the isp don't want the openreach charges , just as you don't want the standard charge of £130, and still be no better off
Been in that all too familiar situation myself took over 2mths, for the fault to develop further and i was able to hear lots of noise with the router disconnected (As there wasn't much point in it being connected) eventually the line died completely

Okay, I plugged the router into the test socket and then plugged the corded phone into the filter, and I could hear crackling on the line. Just to make sure, I unplugged the router and plugged the corded phone into the test socket directly (without a filter) and there was no crackling.

My ISP and phone line provider is Virgin. Is it their responsibility to fix it?

Report a phone fault then when the engineer comes out show him the fault before he does anything. I had over ten engineers out for a HR fault and not one could see a fault on the line. The last engineer that came out also could not see a fault and i insisted i show him what my fault was. He said yup its a HR fault and ran off for 30 mins then came back and said i would need a lift and shift done

Looks like only some of the CP's are using CIDT test system, and even then most of the folk I have met had been given the run around for a good while before the CIDT test was run. Don't Virgin resell BTw ? Not sure, but I have only seen CIDT faults from LLU CP's so far.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

Looks like only some of the CP's are using CIDT test system, and even then most of the folk I have met had been given the run around for a good while before the CIDT test was run. Don't Virgin resell BTw ? Not sure, but I have only seen CIDT faults from LLU CP's so far.

FWIW, Plusnet are "considering" taking up the option to implement CIDT testing.
I hope they do, as I'm convinced I still have a HR issue on my connection as my speeds are still a lot lower than when FTTC was installed in June on the older 8c profile.

Apparently BT's CIDT testing trials with LLU providers have confirmed a successful HR detection rate of over 90%.