reset phone after power outage

[karen]

We lost power this afternoon - transformer blew up.

Back on internet now, but my phone isn't working. Possible some cords got disconnected. Can anyone help?

[wa2ibm]

You might try the old ***999 reboot sequence from your phone to see if that gets it back online.

Bill

[Soren]

***999 certainly beats unplugging and replugging the Analog Telephone Adapter (finally looked up ATA :). And it seems to work.

But this is 2016 and VOIP is supposed to just work: I shouldn't have to manually reboot my ATA after a power outage. Is there a way to get the ATA to automatically retry after a few minutes if it can't register right away?

I am particularly interested because I have our modem and ATA on a timer which cuts power to them when no one is home or we are all asleep. This has three benefits, in the order of which I discovered them:
1) saving energy (I'm a nut and the electronics add up quickly)
2) not surfing the web all night
3) faster redirection to voicemail for friends and family who might call to leave a message during the day

Because of the timer, we sometimes have phone service and sometimes don't. I need to keep a better eye on it and will be filing a support ticket to try and get it resolved, but if anyone has pointers I'd appreciate them.

-Soren

[Soren]

Let me clarify: because of my timer, we have periods when we know the phone won't work (the line is dead and the phone says to check it). Because of the ATA's inability to reliably come online in parallel with the modem, there are also periods when we think we have phone service but don't: the phone line is live but doesn't give a dial-tone ... only speaks "device not registered" and incoming calls don't work!