Telephone stuff - not ringing through to the home phone?

OK. So Tommy Automatic, my driving instructor, tried to phone me several times today to let me know he was on the way. The call would not go through. He showed up and honked, so I came down and watched him dial my house number. He got "invalid number" back at him.

After the lesson I was able to phone him from the house phone, and he tried to dial me again, but he still could not get through. I tried dialing on the daughter's cell and on my emergency cell and they both got through just fine. (The Daughter's cell is on Sky, as is the home phone, but my emergency mobile phone is on O2 and both rang through.)

No idea what to tell Tommy Automatic! I don't know diddlysquat about smartphones (which he was using).  There's not something that would maybe stop him from dialing a landline from a cellphone? (Like how I could not dial a national number from my old EE PAYG phone?)

Does anyone else have a problem calling your landline? (I saw you were able to call your daughter's cell, but was she able to call your landline?)

If other people can call your landline, it's probably not a problem with your landline, but with your instructor's phone.

If other people have trouble calling your landline, it's probably your landline.

Yeah, I was able to dial the home phone on the Daughter's cell, and on my Cell. Rang through fine. I was able to call Tommy Automatic fine from the house phone, too. So it must be with his phone.

[I was wondering because our answering machine has a tendency to act as if a call has come in - no ringing, but it then does the little boop noises and says a specific number has phoned and left no message. So even with the answering machine out of the circuit (totally disconnected it) I could still dial the home phone and get through. Probably the reason the seller listed the phone on Ebay.  ]

It turned out that he was on EE. And EE, on that day for some reason, was unable to complete calls going to landlines!

Glad you figured it out!