Thank you. When I can get in touch with them, I'll firstly check to see who they actually pay line rental to. I may have to drive over if the phone doesn't come back to life.

Useful link. I suspect they don't qualify as, for example, they still both drive so I doubt they are registered as chronically sick and certainly not housebound.

And the husband still has a great sense of humour. He was in the D-Day landings in 1944 and every so often comes up with a new story, many of which his wife hasn't heard before...

. as this kind of fault crosses the boundary from Openreach back to BTW (or TSO), how do you go about progressing a fix for the subscriber?

The Openreach bod rings up whoever (hopefully) gets issued new equipment and then just reruns the jumper from the bar pair to the new equipment. *







*Sounds easy enough, and it should be, but in reality there are plenty of ways the applecart might be upset before such resolution is reached.

If the owner of the number (Virgin) forwarding to the current provider (Possibly BT although this is not clear and is not showing up on BTw checker) is rejecting connection as a fault or NU at the trunk level for callers from several different networks, changing the local exchange port is not going to make much difference.

Edited by deleted (Wed 08-Jun-16 22:28:04)

Yes, but WWWombat asked ....
" as this kind of fault crosses the boundary from Openreach back to BTW (or TSO), how do you go about progressing a fix for the subscriber?"
.... so I mentioned what an Openreach bod might do.

If the problem lies where you suggest, and I'll agree that sounds plausible, how can it be resolved, bearing in mind it will surely be passed to Openreach staff as a CDTA type task.

I wonder if the OP might ask the couple in question whether the line was previously with Virgin at an old address ?

I'll bear that in mind. As far as I know they've been in the property for many years, but I don't know the history.

The phone worked this morning!

It's looking as if it's a pure Virgin setup. Assuming the husband isn't getting too confused he says they have TV through that cable stuff. So it's likely I'd have thought that the telephone is similar. He can't find a bill, doesn't know where his wife has put them; may need to wait till she's out of hospital, hopefully in the next day or two.

They've both referred to BT when talking about the phone, but I'd guess that is because, to them, BT supply telephone services. Quite understandably they can't comprehend the complexity of telephone provision today. Clearly there's more to come but getting reliable information is challenging.

All-in-all you are having an interesting few days .

As W S Gilbert said, "Things are seldom what they seem; Skim milk masquerades as cream".

It's looking as if it's a pure Virgin setup

Marvellous, kinda explains why the number range is registered to them.

Edited by Zarjaz (Thu 09-Jun-16 11:08:07)

In reply to a post by partial:

If the owner of the number (Virgin) forwarding to the current provider (Possibly BT although this is not clear and is not showing up on BTw checker) is rejecting connection as a fault or NU at the trunk level for callers from several different networks, changing the local exchange port is not going to make much difference.

It is certainly true that the addition of number portability offers this extra mode of failure that I hadn't accounted for, and (given the most recent conversations) it looks like Virgin are indeed more likely to be the source of the issue.

However, I wonder how you could possibly know that it could *only* be Virgin, and *not* any other local exchange issue? Surely it is a matter of probabilities here, not certainties?