Digital Voice and the vulnerable elderly - what a (sick) joke!

[kafka-esque]

Picture this. You are vulnerable elderly. You rely on your landline, don't have a mobile or email, and no pushy, tech savvy younger relatives to set things up for you, and harrass companies when things go wrong.

You hear that you must change to 'digital voice'. It will be better, apparently. You must have internet, which you haven't had before. You don't understand why. The wiring must be changed. BT will handle it, don't worry! Except they hand it to Openreach, which is staffed by a noisy call centre in India where the staff have strong accents and use jargon you don't understand. Openreach subcontract it to Kellys. They seem nice, but BT want you to manage the whole process by text message and email.

You need extension leads for all the power supplies, which you must pay for. They say you can keep your phone where you used to have it, on the table in the lounge, where it's been since 1975. There's a gizmo that needs plugging in. But the nice man from Kellys says it doesn't work. You need to plug your phone in in the room with the hub thing. You can't get to that phone in time.

Does BT give a sh*t about all this? Has it put in place any staff to support these people? Has it made any attempt to start identifying who they are, ahead of the 'digital switchover'? Or will it leave them til last, wait to hear from them and then cut off their service when they don't take the initiative?

That might sound dramatic, but I know someone whose mother only received inbound calls as she has dementia. BT assumed she was DEAD and cut off the line.

[imjolly]

if you elderly relative or mother are phone only - no internet - then they are in the last category t be moved to digital voice  openreach are in looking into a phone that phone only people will be able to use but not available yet

try reading the digital voice FAQ and the links included

https://community.bt.com/t5/Home-phone-including-Digital/Digital-Voice-FAQs/td-p/2207485

[kafka-esque]

Interesting, thanks. A vulnerable person could not understand the first sentence of that, however, so you see the huge gulf there.

Here is an interesting article. I note what they say about it not really being a 1 year extension.

I do have an elderly mother who is switching well ahead of schedule, because I took the initiative. My late dad did use internet and they had Plusnet fibre to the cabinet and a landline. She was told she must migrate to BT to keep a landline because VOIP will only be available from BT (hardly fair competition, but whatevs). Despite that Plusnet is a subsidiary of BT, this has been a total nightmare, of dozens and dozens of emails and texts, and nobody explained that this involves 'porting the number' and that may involve days with no service. Until there was days with no service.

Wait time to the call centre is 40 minutes in the evenings, then to be transferred to so called 'tech' is another wait, with a maximum timeout of 10 minutes, after which you are thrown out of the queue and have to go back to square one. Ie stay in an endless loop for the rest of your life, unless like me you are a pushy, devious, manipulative old mare, who grew up in a time where everything was done on the phone, you worked a switchboard for a government department and you know all the tricks in the book.

I put the order in in June, mom is without a phone line all this week. My username was chosen on purpose.

Further comments on the actions of BT welcome, by anyone who knows more about their 'plans'.

[Christopher_G]

Hi @kafka-esque 

Welcome to the community.

We have a BT Vulnerability policy, which is designed to get extra help for those who are in need of it. We try to make the switchover as easy as possible and have support teams on hand to help, when needed.

I've sent you a private message to try and get some help for your mother's landline service.

Chris

[kafka-esque]

Thankyou Chris, that is kind and I will reply to your PM. Worth to note that at no time were we told about the support team for the vulnerable, despite that I registered her as vulnerable from the start.

None of the automated emails mentioned a possible break in service during the transfer, nor did Plusnet when I phoned the order in. If you are in any position to feed back all of this, I will be happy to write you a summary of the saga with my comments once the situation is sorted, if you can assure me it will go to anyone who gives a damn and can do anything, and not into a whirling void of dysfunction, which is my current impression of the BT / Plusnet / Openreach empire. I have been keeping full notes, plus a folder of emails and all the texts.

The initial hypothetical scenario I described above doesn't really describe the hassles I have had for my mom. I simply imagined what it would be like if she didn't have a pushy daughter to stand up for her. 

I note you didn't comment on the issues with the call centre waits and timeouts. What is the official line on that?

[chrisjp]

"They say you can keep your phone where you used to have it, on the table in the lounge, where it's been since 1975. There's a gizmo that needs plugging in. But the nice man from Kellys says it doesn't work."

I'm afraid the "nice man from Kellys" is wrong. DV adapters ("gizmos") DO work - they are like a portable phone socket that you can locate anywhere you have a mains electricity socket to plug it into.
I have two in my house since I was switched to DV - one was free, the other I paid £20 for and both work well.
I also don't understand your anticipated need for "extension leads for all the power supplies". You'll need some sort of hub for DV, granted, and this will need one power supply. However, if you locate the hub reasonably near to an electricity socket they'll be no need for any extension lead and, as I've said, a DV adapter allows you to have your phone anywhere you want in the house.
The only downside of DV over the old analogue phone system is that you do need an electricity supply to the house, so in the event of a power cut you lose your phone service. This can be mitigated by use of a battery backup system and I understand BT is working on plans to provide these to vulnerable customers

[kafka-esque]

The nice man from Kellys did in fact say that the one they had sent to my mom seemed dodgy - I didn't make that up, and he did try to plug her phone with the answering machine into the router in a room she doesn't go in, thinking that it was no problem for a woman who can barely walk and has memory issues to go into another room just to look for phone messages, because she had the second handset in the lounge. This shows how little people are trained to understand the ways and needs of vulnerable elderly.

3 power sockets are needed as I understand it - one for the fibre box, one the router and one the DV adaptor.

Also another for each phone, if they are hands free ones (in comparison to the old type of phone, which didn't need a power supply).

Setting up my mom's house for the engineer visit, I had to purchase two extension leads, as houses occupied by people who have been living there since 1962 like her, aren't usually highly provisioned with sockets.

Plus add on another socket for your hypothetical battery the boffins are developing in their secret underground laboratory, hopefully before the copper wires are turned off.

[gg30340]

If your mother has DECT cordless phones with a base station and one as an extension all that is needed is to plug the base station into the power socket then into the phone port on the BT Smarthub and the base station phone and the extension cordless phone will work in the same way as it does now.

[kafka-esque]

See my paragraph above: she does not want the answering machine (ie phone base station) in a room she barely goes in (where the smarthub is). She can barely walk and has memory problems - should she have to remember to go in a room specially to check her answering machine? Please don't tell me to make her use the virtual answering machine - she is 85, set in her routines, tech phobic, finds it hard to learn new things. She just wanted her answering machine WHERE IT WAS. My original point is about VULNERABLE people. People who can't do the things you can do, who can't cope with changes.

By the way, no one from BT has responded, no one made the booked callback yesterday, (thanks Connections Team, hope you are having a lovely morning!)

[licquorice]

All that is required is to place a Digital Voice Adapter at a location of your choosing and plug the answering machine into it. Rocket science it isn't.