Telephone troubles?

I've just bought a new cordless phone after the last one stopped working. The setup is that I have two cordless phones, one upstairs and one downstairs. Before the upstairs one stopped working both phones were fine. Now I have problems with the upstairs one and I've tried plugging in the downstairs one to see if the phone was faulty but it had the same problem.

The problem is that although the phone detects an incoming call (it displays the caller number on the display) I cannot answer the call, nor can I make a call from the phone. I can't hear a dial tone.

The phone is a BT Freestyle 3200 and I'm on TalkTalk with broadband. I've had the broadband with TalkTalk for some time and the phone has worked fine until recently.

Apart from YahooAnswers, I don't know who to contact, because you can bet that BT will blame TalkTalk, TalkTalk will put me through to someone in India who hasn't a clue what I'm talking about, and both will blame me! Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Potty.
its does seem at 1st that one of the phones had a problem.
But assuming you have a socket both upstairs and downstairs, check these have dial tone with a normal cabled phone.. if ok, ensure one is a master and other is a slave, (master has x3 components on the back- slave doesnt)
if this is ok.... and your confident that the phones is ok, then its reception or settings. someone or something is blocking the signal. Assuming the 3200 is a dect phone, this is very hard to do. but if its analogue, every now and then you get some hissing..then this could be a neighbour and taxi firm etc... and you will need to chnage the channel, as most normally have 8.
If its a dect phone, ring the phones helpline, Argos normally have it on the phones bit, but if all is ok,i would try a friend phone in there, i have and always used panasonic, these only ever fail due to the battery or abuse, like my son dropping it!. a x4 pack which is all you would ever need and from panasonics website they are cheaper than high st stores!
hope this helps...good luck

You need to register your phone with the hub. Dig out your setup instructions or come back here.

Sounds like the cradle rest switch is jammed. Or there may be a switch you need to operate to answer the call/make a call which is not working.

This is evident by not being able to get the dial tone.

I assume the phone is not mutted.

It depends on your set up. Ideally you should have one BT socket and one cordless phone system with 2 (or more) cordless handsets. This also allows you to make internal calls within the house for free.

You say the new phone works ok downstairs but not upstairs. Assuming the main incoming BT socket is downstairs this indicates a problem with (probably) either the internal cabling or (possibly) the upstairs socket. Trace the cabling and check for damage along the entire length. Replace it if necessary. Get a BT punch down tool and make sure the cables are terminated in the sockets firmly. Do these 2 jobs thoroughly and your problem will be solved.