Troubleshooting your phone line

If your home phone isn't working and you don't have a dial tone, the first thing to do is check for outages. If you are not in an area outage, the next step is to troubleshoot your service.

You can use our Troubleshooter tool or check some common issues yourself. You can also watch a video about troubleshooting your phone line.

Use Troubleshooter to identify and repair problems

The best way to troubleshoot your service is with our Troubleshooter tool. This tool will walk you through all the relevant questions and steps and check your line for you. At the end, if repair is needed, Troubleshooter will help you schedule a technician appointment.

Troubleshoot problems with your service

Open Troubleshooter

Video: Troubleshooting a phone line

Do-it-yourself troubleshooting steps

Whether you're hearing static or noise on your line, having trouble hearing or being heard on calls, experiencing disconnection mid-call, or your phone isn't ringing, we have tips and solutions to fix your home phone line. These are similar to the steps Troubleshooter will walk you through. If you don't want to use the tool, you can follow the list below on your own.

Common account issues that can affect your phone service

Before you start more detailed equipment troubleshooting, think about these two common issues:

Is your account suspended for non-payment?
Do you need to reactivate service after a vacation hold?

Phone troubleshooting checks

Hardware inspection

First, visually inspect each jack, looking for any obvious damage. Use a flashlight to look inside each jack. You should be able to clearly see gold pins in each one. If they're blue, green, black or smoky, you've likely found a problem. Pay particular attention to jacks that could be exposed to moisture. Condensation from water (or exposure to the ammonia in pet urine) can cause copper contacts to corrode.

There could be more than one jack that's not working. If you find one, still continue to check the others.

Service inspection

Next, check that each phone jack is working properly.

Unplug your phone from both the jack and electrical outlet.
Unplug any other equipment from that same jack.
After you've unplugged all your equipment, wait 1 minute and then plug in a corded phone.

You should hear a clear, strong dial tone when you test each jack. If you don't, and no other equipment is plugged in, you may have a problem with your inside wiring. Learn how to get it fixed.

If you do hear a clear, strong tone, then continue to plug in additional equipment, one thing at a time, and listen each time. When you hear the noise again, you'll know you've either reached the maximum capacity for that line or the last piece of equipment you connected is causing interference. Try moving that equipment to a different line or installing a radio suppresser or radio/noise filter on your line.

Your phone and DSL internet use the same line. DSL filters and splitters allow you to use both phone and internet service without interference. Incorrectly connected and/or damaged DSL filters can cause noise on your line.

Plug a filter into each wall jack that is connected to a telephone, and plug the phone cord into the filter.

Note: If you have cordless phones, you only need to install a filter on the phone base that plugs in to the wall jack; no filters are needed on the cordless units that only plug into an electrical outlet.

Diagram of phone plugging into DSL filter

You may also use a splitter if you want to plug both a landline phone and a modem into one wall jack, as shown below.

Illustration of phone and router plugging into DSL splitter

Filters are not included in your modem kit. If you have a landline phone and internet with CenturyLink, filters should have been included at the time of your order and will arrive in a separate package. If you did not receive filters, please chat with us.

Have a home security system? Chat with us to get a technician to install a whole-home filter on the line outside your home. There is an installation fee for this.