Digital Voice.

[RIC9380]

@PlanetVisitor - No.  You posted a link to an article which, to the average customer, merely stokes up yet more fear about the ongoing transition towards digital telephony.

[Jane2018]

I replied because someone said I would be along to add to the thread......  That is all.

We all know you do not just plug your corded landline to back of the hub. Instead you have to do a lot more - new hub etc etc. I have found the forum very useful in learning all these different things I will have to do when Digital voice comes to London and will be happy to report on the experience. It might be easier than I think.

What about answering this one question? When I go out into the garden for a while I take the landline off the hook - it takes about 1 second to do it and then the calls go to voicemail.Will that work in the same way with digital voice?

(Also a follow up - will it still do that loud screamer thing when off the hook?)

I am not asking for raise difficulties. I just genuinely want to know on both the above points.

[chrisjp]

Setting up my Smarthub 2 instead of my previous modem/router took about 10 minutes, and unplugging my corded phone from the wall socket and plugging it into the SH2 took about 10 seconds. Everything then worked just fine.
I also then spent another half hour of so pairing a couple of DECT DV adapters with the SH2 and then placing them in the house so I could have my other two corded phones where they were before.
It really was very simple - the only wrinkle was that the two DV connected phones didn't ring with oncoming calls - but a question by me on this forum advised to try plugging them in via the ADSL filters that I'd previously used - and this worked.
So, really, there's nothing to worry about with the DV transition.

[Confused52]

@Jane2018  I do not yet have DV but the feature you are asking about is an interaction between two PSTN services. Historically such interactions are not taken forward in new versions. I would be surprised if it works. The first feature is a maintenance feature:  If you get Dial Tone and time out dialling a recognised number you first hear Special Information Tone followed be "Please hang up and try again" repeatedly. After a while the announcement stops and then a timer runs waiting for you to clear the call. If you do not take the handset on-hook the exchange assumes there is a faulty permanent loop and puts the line into a Parked state it also then applied a Digital Howler designed to get your attention and put the phone back on the hook. This part is about exchange maintenance so the line is marked as Out of Service until it detects on hook again.

When you call an out of service line it goes to Voice Mail if it is active. That is the combination of services you are asking about.

In Digital Voice the dial tone does not come from the exchange. If the Enhanced DECT phone times out, after 20 seconds, because you give no digits it should drop back with an error message. Importantly as far as the exchange based equipment is concerned you never made a call. It can still send new call Invites to your Modem and it can still page your phone.

To get what you wanted you have to use Voicemail the way you were intended to and access the Main Menu and change the number of rings to zero. In addition you will have to change it back when you re-enter the house, that is the step you are most likely to forget.

Others with DV can check this by simply sending an empty called number from a DECT handset and see what happens after 5 minutes if you call your fixed line from a mobile and see if the handset used rings. 

[Jane2018]

Thank you. I have found the forum very useful and whilst I know I annoy people with questions I am the sort of person who just likes to know about things in advance and slowly consider them and get ready. Currently when I go out to do jobs outside I take the phone off the hook so it goes straight to voicemail. that is part of my day. I probably do it about 2 or 3 times a day. when I get back in I pick up the receiver and listen to the sound of the dial tone - that tone tells me if someone has left a voicemail and that decides if I dial in to get the voice mail. It is something I do every day of the year.

That is one thing that it now sounds like will be different. Of course I can adapt to this. I adapted when the huge expensive answering machines you plug in largely disappeared and I used voice mail via BT callminder (which I still use). i remember back in the 1970s I think it was or 80s my father buying what was then an expensive first telephone answering machine with tapes - it was a big day and a very interesting piece of kit in its time. Things move on. When things get better with tech I think it's great. When they get worse I don't think it's great.

There will be a solution to when I want the landline to go straight to voicemail several times a day when I go outside compared with my normal not off the hook setting of 10 rings as I run like a herd of elephants to catch the phone when I am elsewhere in the house. In other words I want a long ring on generally which will be my new setting but it would be good to think of a way to have the current feature of phone off the hook, right to voicemail because I am very busy outside and won't be running in but I don't want the poor caller waiting for the 10 rings but nor do I want several times a day to be changing the voicemail settings. The answer may simply be the poor callers have to wait the 10 rings to get to call minder but we shall see.

I have no problem with losing the screecher noise when phone off hook as I never liked it very much.

[wkirkman]

@Jane2018 This may seem like a silly question perhaps, but other than habit, ‘why’ do you take the phone off the hook to invoke voicemail?

Why not just let people ring and when it isn’t answered in a certain number of rings, voicemail will automatically be invoked?

I mean, that is how it is meant to be used.

[Jane2018]

The reason is that if I take phone off hook because I am unavailable it goes to voicemail within 1 ring so a family member or work call does not wait for 10 rings to get voicemail - it saves that person a hole load of time or indeed stops them hanging up without leaving a message in disgust at the delay. Whereas if I am in running distance to the phone and available the 10 rings allows me to run down even from 2 flights up in the house and sometimes from the garden. I am probably the only person in England who wants that option and given  for any working from home calls I would prefer emails anyway perhaps I should be glad if people are deterred from speaking to me.

it is just yet another change with DV - one of very many but I will adapt to it all. It is simply that I want all the information in advance about all these changes to my day to date life.

[chrisjp]

A bit off-topic but these postings remind me of when BT (then Post Office Telephones) hard-wired your phone and wouldn't let you install you own answering machine. You had to rent a clunky one from them at an extortionate rental and then wait for weeks or often months until an engineer was sent to your house to install it.
There was a way around this, offered by an enterprising answering machine manufacturer. This had a mechanical arm which subsituted for the handset and held the contacts on the phone down. The handset was re-positioned against a microphone and loudspeaker provided on the machine. When the phone rang a microphone picked this up and the machine was triggered to lift the mechanical arm thus connecting the call. It then played an outgoing message into the handset and recorded any message left by the caller on a loop of tape. This actually worked quite well and you could install it immediately yourself rather than waiting perhaps months for PO Telephones to install one.

[countrypaul]

PSTN  is the old Public Switched Telephone Network  that Ofcom (as far as I can tell) has decided should be switched off  and all telephone services switched to some form of Digital whether the supplier is Virgin, Talktalk, Sky, BT or another.

[RIC9380]

Yes, but the change is being led by the broadband and phone companies, prompted by Openreach’s announcement some years ago that that it was to withdraw its Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) products that rely on the outdated and failing PSTN by 2025.

The change is not unique to the UK and a number of countries across Europe and around the world have completed, or are in the process of, a similar transition. 

RIC9380