said by Eeyore :I am a Frontier customer in Ohio. I have phone and DSL service. I have one corded phone and I notice it has been saying "Line In Use" a lot recently. But there is no one talking on the phone, and it is the only one I have in the house.
I've had this happen to me several times before.
The first time it ever happened on my phone, which is a 2012 Panasonic cordless, I called Tech Support.
I was told that I had a "short" on my line, which was described as "burst" of electricity that had tricked down from the telephone pole to my line and disrupted it.
To be perfectly honest, I thought that was complete BS (and it sounded like a lame excuse).
At any rate, I was told to unplug the phone from the wall and remove the telephone line from the back of the unit and let it sit, undisturbed, for 60 seconds, then plug it back in.
That solved the problem THAT time (I had a dial tone once everything was plugged back in), but the countless other times I've encountered the problem, unplugging the phone and plugging everything back in is pointless.
So, if you call Tech Support from a cell phone, that's what they'll tell you to do (and probably secretly hope that you do have a dial tone by the time you get it hooked back up).
I've come to the conclusion that it has nothing to do with my phone and everything to do with the fact that it's just crappy phone service. If you don't have a dial tone, it's not the phone, it's just a glitch in service that they're probably scrambling to fix.
The one thing that seems to work for me when it happens is to turn my handset's speaker phone on and wait until I hear a dial tone. Then, I shut the handset off, then hit talk and I usually have a dial tone from which I then dial out with to try and resolve the problem.
It doesn't always work, but most of the time it does (and then, other times, I won't have a dial tone 10 minutes later).
Bottom line, it's the phone service, not the phone.