Can someone tell me why I and others can hear an echo on my house phone?

Whenever I use the house telephone I can hear an echo on my line, and I also can hear repeating anything that I have just said. Others have asked me why the echo. This is embarrassing and I have asked my neighborst if they have this problem they have all tolded me now. Will someone please give me an answer.

*It happen sometimes. It could be the signal w/c is very low or the place where u r.
*Ur phone has defect.
*Phone could be so aggressive to catch communications outside. (Like one of my landlines, it could catch radio communications between police officers calling each other on patrol or taxi drivers using walkie talkie.)
*Ur not tapped unless ur doing something wrong.
*Better ask help from ur tel company to check it out.

It could be a number of things from something as simple as the way the phone is wired to the possibility that you are being wiretapped. Party-line telephones used to echo alot. Are you possibly on a party-line telephone system?

They same thing happened to my homeboy and his phone was tapped. Just watch what you say. Do you ever hear other peoples conversations interrupting your phone line while talking to a friend? It could be this or you might just need a another phone.

If it happens all the time call the phone company, it's probably a bad amplifier out at the pole.
An echo can be caused by the phone of the person you are talking to. In telephony, there is a thing called 'sidetone'. What they do is feed the input of the mouthpiece microphone back to the earpiece. Otherwise you couldn't hear yourself talking and would talk louder than you need to. Sometimes your voice gets returned to you thru this 'sidetone' on the other guys phone, along with the 'sidetone' from your own phone and the roundtrip takes slightly longer sounding like an echo. Sometimes it's a bad circuit in the phone network. If cops are tapping your phone you probably wouldn't hear anything unusual because they use sophisticated methods provided by the phone company these days.
Another thing is if you're talking to a cell phone, echo's are common. You could be calling someone who has defective tapping equipment tapping HIS phone.
Let's face it, it's the age of Big Brother, use your phone as if it is always tapped.

Can be either the phone line - or the phone itself. I would try another phone and if the problem is still there then call 611 (thats repair) and they would run some tests or even send a tech out.

What is happening is some where between you and the person you are calling one of the trunks is out of SYNC. When a phone call is made it is sent across a trunk at a certain rate, (known as TDM, Time Domain Multiplexing) when the timeing is off you notice a echo on the line.