BT Versatility telephone system known problems

Applies to

This article applies to the following products.

System completely dead

Symptoms

All telephones are completely dead; nothing is shown on the display of any telephone, there are no lights showing, none of the buttons on any of the telephones do anything. There is no sound to be heard from any telephone handset.

Cause

  1. There is no mains power to the telephone system control unit.
  2. There is mains power to the telephone system control unit but it does not work due to a fault.

Repair

  1. Make sure that the telephone system control unit is plugged into the mains and that the switch at the mains plug is on.
  2. Make sure that the plug is firmly pushed into the mains socket.
  3. Turn the system off, wait 5 minutes, and turn it back on. Please note that if there is a switch on the left hand side of the telephone system near where the mains cable goes in, this is for switching the supply from the backup battery, not the mains. You will need to turn off both this switch and the switch at the mains plug in order to switch the system off. Give the system at least 1 minute to start up, after which it should be working if it is OK.
  4. Check that there is mains power available at the mains socket, perhaps by plugging in a table lamp or similar.

If none of the above solve the problem and you are certain there is power at the telephone system, the system probably has a fault. Please contact us for help.

System will not start

Symptoms

The display of all Versatility system phones looks similar to the following.

Initialising

Nothing works. It is not possible to make or receive any internal or external calls.

It is likely that the problem started suddenly with no warning. Either it happened overnight, with the telephones not working when your office was opened in the morning, or the telephones suddenly stopped working during the day.

Sometimes this problem happens for a brief period, perhaps a few hours, then appears to get better by itself. If this happens, it is a warning that it will probably happen again. On the subsequent occasion, it will probably not get better by itself and will leave you with no working telephones.

Cause

The usual cause is the failure of one or more electronic components in the telephone system control unit.

Repair

In most cases, we can either replace or repair the faulty parts and restore the system to full working order.