Recently switched over to Digital Voice mainly because I started a new Broadband contract with BT and it now has to be Digital Voice - going to happen anyway in the year. The gentleman I spoke to at the call centre assured me the switch-over would take several days and I'd be informed. I ordered a couple of the Digital Voice Adapters as we have several extension phones round quite a large property. We already have a Smart Hub 2 for the Broadband.
The following morning I spotted an email from BT saying the digital service was good to go. I then checked the phones and was somewhat non-plussed to find they had gone dead overnight. Not what I expected. I plugged a phone into the Smart Hub and was relieved to get dial tone, so we had one phone working. I was also pleasantly surprised to find the socket provides enough ringing voltage to operate an old phone with a trembler bell. The Adapters can also do this. It's not a trivial thing to do.
The next problem was that we'd lost the Caller ID on incoming calls. I thought that I'd probably need a BT Digital Home Phone to get this info, but phoned up a BT call centre. The lady I spoke to said it just needed to be activated "from the exchange". Apparently this is usually the case, though she couldn't understand why it wasn't done automatically with the Digital Voice contract. Within 10 minutes I got an email saying the service was good to go, and we now have caller ID restored on the old analogue phones. Somebody thought about this when designing the adapter.
The main problem I've got is the integration of the system. You can register five Digital Home Phones or Digital Phone Adapters on the SH2 through its DECT system. These seem to operate largely independently allowing you to make or receive two simultaneous calls. All the phones ring on an incoming call, but once you pick up a phone, that one, or the extensions connected to the Adapter, effectively takes the call. If you pick up another phone on the system all you get is dial tone. On the old system, we'd pick up a call upstairs and be able to take it downstairs by lifting another phone. We can still do this if the two phones are on the same Adapter. You can also set the Digital Home Phone to "Auto Join" and join the call on it, but not the other way round. If you take the call on the digital phone, you get dial tone on the other phones.
So, is there any way to set the "Auto Join" function on the Digital Phone Adapter which is occupying one of the five registrations on the SH2? All these call options are stored in the SH2 as I understand it, even though set up from the Digital Home Phone. I couldn't find any of this information from the SH2 Control Panel, or any way to set the "Auto Join" function. Does anyone know if this can be done?
