Would a german phone (beocom 1600) work in Australia ?

Ive been doing a little ebay shopping and have two pretty good examples of beocom 1600's - one from Germany and one from the US.

The US one (type 1008046) works perfectly plugged in to an Aus phone socket.

The German one (type 1007563) appears to be a bit obstinate - no dial tone, no ringer.

Now it could be a dud phone in need of repair / TLC but I wanted to check if there was any technical reason it should not work ?

Both phones are set to Tone (at least the german one is set to MFV, the same side as Tone on the US one),

If there is no logical reason for it not to work then I'll pursue the buyer. Any info greatly appreciated on whether a phone from Germany should work in Australia.

Cheers Tony

 

Hi

As its corded, I would say it should be fine.

I never looked in to a B&O (wireless) phone from overseas as I thought they operated on diff GHz bands and wouldn't work here, but as the 1600 is not wireless, i can't see an issue with it.

I have a number of phones bought in the U.K. And they all work fine here in Thailand 

The ebay seller is insistent that the German phones expect a different RJ11 wiring scheme from the Aus wiring scheme and so any standard Aus RJ11 cables (such as one from *** Smith) won't work.

I'm happy to give him the benefit of the doubt (he's offered to send me through a cross wired Rj11 as i'm to ham fisted to make one) and wait and see if his cable kicks the German Beocom 1600 phone into life .... to at least get a dial tone !

I guess I was surprised that B&O had amended their model that much between countries - but I guess that what you get for assumptions. I'm on a learning journey with this....

 

I gotta say though the Beocom 1600/2400/2500 are a great design piece (i'm now the proud owner of 2 - 1xUS Black & 1xGerman Turquoise).

ToeKneeAus:

I guess I was surprised that B&O had amended their model that much between countries - but I guess that what you get for assumptions. I'm on a learning journey with this....

It's not just B&O varying their phones, it's the different telecom systems that require the variations. This all stems from very early days; the Telcos wanted to sell the telephones as well and having localized connectors and wiring schemes suited them very well. And since everything needs to be backwards compatible, it's not easy to break out of that.

Silly things, for example pulse dial phones aren't interchangeable between Sweden and Finland although everything else except the plug is compatible - for pulse dialing, Finland uses 1-10 pulses to represent numbers 1-2...-9-0, while Sweden uses 1-10 pulses for 0-9... (or vice versa, I'm glad to have forgotten already).