I am trying to help someone help someone in a care home with a phone issue. The lady in question is entirely inflexible and can only deal with a phone like the one she has always been used to, which is a land line with a handset. She is unable to cope with a normal cell phone. She needs an old-fashioned handset she can pick up to call out or answer. She previously had a Spark land line on the care home system but that has now been disestablished due to the end of copper. The residents of this home are on their own as far as private phones in their rooms go.

Her daughter, who has no technical knowledge, brought a phone from Australia because it has the required handset and she could find nothing comparable in New Zealand. The phone is a Senico, model Easy Dial (no other info on it). The daughter was assured by the phone salesperson that it would work normally in New Zealand.

The phone does work fine at different locations, but not at the care home. For some reason random test calls get sent to voicemail instead of ringing the phone. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. At other locations it works perfectly normally all of the time. This problem only seems to occur in the one location where the phone is actually needed.

I don’t know much about phones and I don’t know what to do about this situation. Maybe the cell signal is unusually weak in the older lady’s room, or maybe there is some kind of local interference. The daughter says that moving the phone around the room does seem to affect how it works, but the one place it needs to be for the older lady’s access is where it becomes intermittent.

The phone also has wi-fi and there is wi-fi at the home, but the daughter has been told that only works on a post-pay account and the phone is currently on Spark pre-pay. She is confused and frankly, so am I. Is there anything to do about this situation? It is all way over my head.