I've just bought this phone from the UK as it has some features I want and was quite reasonably priced. It's a BT Converse 2300
I've changed the phone cable for an RJ11 male-male with a French phone plug but no dial tone and can't make calls.
Have I made a balls-up or should it work?
Thanks Julian :) Good luck Al!
It's probably no consolation, James, but phone problems aren't confined to France. I've spent a good two hours today trying to get BT to send me two screws to secure my "master socket" properly. I think I lost them during a rewire 20 years ago. I could bore you for, well, two hours with tales of the unfathomable BT website and unfruitful conversations with call centre staff. But I won't. Suffice to say, I finally found the size of screws I needed and ordered them from Amazon. The alternative seemed to be to summon an engineer, who would install them for £108. I hope you find the answer to your problem more easily.
I tried all manner of adapters and configurations prior. There are four cables in the BT RJ11, the french equivalent would use the center pair (3 and 4 green and red) but the BT phone uses one cable from each of the tow outside pairs (2 and 5 Yellow and black). I have an idea that the french systems requires a third cable for the ring signal, so that must be the green or the red one I suppose.
The other phones in the house ring though so I'm not too concerned about that!
It seems the wiring in the cable from the phone to the socket can vary (as you have found), so directly swapping a UK cable for a French one may not work properly. I'd be inclined to replace the UK cable and use an adapter to plug into the French socket. This may address any incompatibility in the wiring pin-out. Presumably the adapters are designed to sort out any issues with the wiring and transfer the ring tone (or so you would hope). I'm sure some guru will appear shortly with a more definitive answer but it might be worth trying an adapter in the meantime. If it doesn't work, feel free to send the me the bill -- if you can find me.
Good luck.
Thanks Nick. Turns out that the cable needed rewiring. I can use it now, although it doesn't ring, maybe I need to use a third cable too, not sure which one though.
Shot in the dark, but if you have internet through the same line, you will need to put in the internet/telephone filter (looks just like an un cabled telephone adapter) in first.
Thanks Dave, I thought it might be something like that. Where can I find this guru!
Seeing as it is a BT phone there is a good possibility it needs another adapter BT phones often need 3 wires, as opposed to the normal 2. And even if it does not need the 3rd connector BT often wire their phones differently to other people.Some guru out on the web has no doubt written an article as to how to overcome this.
