Digital Voice for Elderly Relative

[hailesaladdie]

An elderly relative of mine has been notified she's being migrated to digital voice. Having read through what's on offer, I've a number of concerns.

As she has limited mobility, she has 5 different handsets in different parts of the house. These have large keys and extra loud volume settings.

I haven't been able to find any digital equivalent yet, so it would be the adapters (which would be a stretch, money-wise) plus would need electrical adapters as there's no free sockets.

Am also rather concerned about access to emergency services in case of a router problem (which happens from time to time) or a powercut. The 1h battery isn't much use if she's upstairs, and she has not other means of communication. She can't reset the router, or reach any of the cabling. We live a couple of hours away.

Any thoughts on a setup that's going to work for her, and not be prohibitively expensive?

[licquorice]

If you simply connect the green socket on the hub to any phone socket after first removing the 2 incoming external wires on the master socket, you will be back to how you were.

If the present handsets are cordless, they wouldn't work in a power cut either.

[hailesaladdie]

Thanks.

Presumably this means she'd need to have a new socket installed for the hub to plug into first?

[licquorice]

I was assuming she was moving to full fibre, is she getting Digital Voice via the copper connection? If so, my method won't work. Does she currently use corded or cordless phones?

[hailesaladdie]

I don't know, really.  We've certainly not requested full fibre, and she's had no notification.  At the moment it's basically the setup from the rewiring in the 80s.

The handsets are cordless.

[licquorice · Accepted solution]

In which case you can either re- register the phones to the hub which is a Dect base station or plug the existing base station into the green phone socket on the hub. 

[hailesaladdie]

As far as I can tell, they are all directly connected to a phone socket, rather than being paired to a single base station.  Will have to see if I can find how to do this before our next trip over that way.

(They're DORO PhoneEasy 100s, if that makes any difference.)

[Keith_Beddoe]

@hailesaladdie 

Then all they need to do is to unplug the base unit from the phone socket, and plug it into the back of the Smart Hub 2, as shown in green below, as @licquorice  has suggested. Pairing the phones to the smart hub 2, would lose full feature of the Doro phones.

[licquorice]

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@hailesaladdie wrote:

As far as I can tell, they are all directly connected to a phone socket, rather than being paired to a single base station.  Will have to see if I can find how to do this before our next trip over that way.

(They're DORO PhoneEasy 100s, if that makes any difference.)

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I would be very surprised if they are all plugged into phone sockets, i.e multiple base stations. I suspect there is one base station and the extra handsets are just plugged into charging units rather than connected to phone sockets.

Unless she lives in a mansion with granite walls, one base station  is usually sufficient to cover the whole house.

[hailesaladdie]

More like a 70s house with plasterboard 🙂

No idea how it's been set up (and I wouldn't necessarily trust that it's been done the "best" way) but I've found the pairing instructions for the handsets.  I'll have a play next time we're in that part of the country.  Thankyou both for your help.