Telephone problem?

Hi,
I have a problem with my phones in my house,all 4???
They were working yesterday earlier,then just stopped working?
None of my 4 phones work,I even tried replacing the wall jack.
The portable phone has a flashing light,that says "in use"?
There is no dial tone at all.
Twice it has had a busy signal when I pick it up,and and operator
recording also???
Any ideas??
The phones on the 2nd floor apt work fine?Thanks, Charlie

 

Most likely, someone was messing around in the apartment building's telephone demarcation point (where the line from the street connects to the building's internal phone wiring), and accidentally disconnected or shorted out your line. Perhaps you could check with your neighbors to see if anyone had any phone work done recently. Call the phone company and see if they'll come out for free to see if it's a problem in their box.

If the main box is fine, then I'd suspect the first jack in your apt. This would be the jack closest to the demarcation point. If that one goes bad (like a loose wire), it could affect all the others in your apt.
-- Jim

 

From your post, I'm not sure if your dwelling is a house, or an appartment building.

For a house, if your phone wiring was installed in the past tenish or so years, you will have a "demark" box. It is a grey box where the wire from the phone company ends, and the wire in the dwelling begins. It usually has a door you can open, and a regular modular telepone plug. Take a known good phone, and plug it directly into the jack in this box. If it works, the problem is in your house wiring. If it doesn't work, it is a phone company problem, which they will fix for free.

If you live in an appartment, sometimes they do something sort of like this. You will see two plates on the wall, one has a phone wire coming out of it, plugged into a jack right next to it. This functions like the demark, if you unplug the wire, all the jacks go dead except the one it was plugged into.