Digital Voice - Cannot receive all incoming calls (Very frustrating)

[David53]

Hello,

We were begrudgingly moved to digital voice many months ago now. We have no mobile signal and live in an area which often has power cuts...

• Ever since being moved to this service we have not been able to receive incoming calls consistently.
• Calls from either landlines or mobiles will either not go through at all, or take 3-4 attempts for them to connect.
• The caller can hear a single continuous tone when they attempt to call us
• We have no problems making outgoing calls
• We have tried multiple handsets -  we are currently using BT branded HD digital voice phones
• We have no broadband issues
• Speaking to customer services we are getting no where. The last thing we tried was cancelling call diversion with no avail - although I'm positive we have never enabled that feature anyway.

Searching through the forums it appears we are not the only ones with this issue. Porting seems to come up fairly often as a potential reason for the issue. We have had the same landline number forever. When the move to digital voice is made, is the number "ported" to the digital service? 

Any help very much appreciated.

Regards,

Dave

[jac_95]

Hi David53,

Thanks for the post and welcome to the Community.

This is an automated response as I can see you have a question about BT’s Digital Voice service. Rather than waiting for a response from the Community, you may find an answer to your question by using the search bar on the Community homepage. We also have a thread that contains a wealth of info related to BT’s Digital Voice, click this link to take a look, Digital Voice FAQs.

To learn more about the nationwide change to this Internet based voice service visit landlinesgo.digital

If you have already looked for the answer to your question and have not found anything that can help, then please ignore this message. One of our Community members will be along shortly to help you further.

[iniltous]

Porting is generally accepted to be moving between providers so in that respect migration to DV is not ‘porting’ .
The problems reported ( and as with most things , people report issues , they don’t report satisfactory service, so a false impression can be given of the scale of an issue ) generally are with numbers that have been moved around various networks, if your number has never been ported , then you don’t have an issue with porting , if the number has never been ported away from BT .
Obviously, unless you call yourself frequently, presumably your impression of this is anecdotal, someone calling you and claiming they struggled to get though…as with any third party report there is always the possibility that the issue is with the network they made their call from.

You may have an issue , there is no disputing that , is there plenty of other reports like yours suggesting it’s a systemic problem, no there isn’t .

If you feel incoming calls are not getting through , report it , although an Openreach visit would achieve little ( DV is a BT proprietary system  ) but you could get a visit where the OR tech , sits by the DV phone ( preferably plugged directly into the hub ) and makes 5, 10 , 20 calls to it , if they are all successful, that pretty much gives it a clean bill of health , if as you claim , there will be some failures, hopefully the OR tech will involve BT by reassigning the fault report to them .

[David53]

RE: Porting - that was my assumption so looks like that's a dead end.

It's certainly not anecdotal, we have personally tried ourselves from both mobiles and various landlines on various different network providers. Just this morning I drove to a spot with good mobile coverage and tried calling and experienced the same issue.

[Keith_Beddoe]

@David53 

You need to look at the overall picture. A bit of history.

Prior to BT Digital Voice, all incoming calls would have been destined to your local exchange. This was achieved by merging call traffic from different providers at certain points of the network, typically exchanges that handled OLO (Other Licenced Operator) handovers. Salisbury Exchange was one of those sites.

Think of a tree with lots of branches all converging to form one trunk. 

With the move to VOIP (Digital Voice) some of these interchange points no longer function, and the call traffic from all those providers have to be re-routed onto VOIP at specific parts of the network.

This was BTs vision for the 21cn network, where all traffic, including voice, would be carried over IP (Internet Protocol).

As you can probably imagine, this is a major task for the BT network, as it is for other providers.

During that complex process, its quite possible for some of these interlinks to be lost, meaning calls will have no destination routing.

The forum moderators do have access to the teams that can trace these missing links, and create routings for them.

The problem is first to identify which calling networks are not being routed, and at which point. Not an easy task.

If you can identify the origin of the calls that are failing, then a moderator can pass this information to the appropriate teams.

[c64z86]

I'm also having the same problem.

Family members can't get through, businesses can't get through and the latest one is that the hairdresser could not ring us back.

It's not always consistent but it's been a big problem ever since we changed over to DV back in June/July.

The only advice I've been offered is to ask them what networks they are calling from, then it will be investigated by BT... but this is damn near impossible to find out sometimes as the workers do not know which phone company their office is using. So how am I supposed to tell BT what network they are calling from?

The BT person who called me said there was not any trouble for him getting through to me, so he doesn't see any problems... well no crud sherlock, you're on BT too so you won't have any problems getting through to me.

So I'm stuck with only a half working DV service because the guys at BT will not investigate until they know what networks are trying to get through to me.

Just wanted to say you're not alone, no matter how much others may try to minimize your problems on here.

[Keith_Beddoe]

Another thing for people to be aware of, is that "short" local numbers no longer work, as they were locally routed through your exchange. 

The full national number now has to be dialled, just like on a mobile. So anyone who had pre-programmed local number, or a paper phone diary, would need to make sure that any short codes were amended. Lots of people still have phone number in written form.

There are issues with DV, that are going to take a long time to sort out.

[c64z86]

Not the OP here but I asked them to dial the full numbers (Because we can call out to them just fine) still the same problems.

[David53]

It seems like this is a very common problem. Just scrolling through this forum only a couple of pages finds people in the same situation:

https://community.bt.com/t5/Home-phone-including-Digital/Digital-Voice-incoming-calls-from-non-BT-ne...

https://community.bt.com/t5/Home-phone-including-Digital/Digital-Voice-incoming-calls-not-working/td...

[David53]

Yes, we've also done the same. What I can't understand is some calls will eventually go through after many attempts. If it were a routing issue then would this happen or would it attempt different routes?