Move Broadband, keep landline ?

[CESIOUS]

I have recently moved my Broadband supplier to somebody other than BT. I wanted to keep my 'landline' as the service is  not available on that supplier yet and I want to keep my number. I've had several phone calls with BT, each time asking several times for confirmation I would keep the landline when I cancelled BT Broadband. I have been absolutely assured this would be the case. The cancellation date was today and of course now my phone line has stopped working. 

Does anybody have idea what I can do to get my phone line and number back,  without ending up going in circles at BT ?

[Keith_Beddoe · Accepted solution]

@CESIOUS 

Welcome to this user forum for BT Residential phone and broadband customers.

As you are not a BT customer, this forum cannot help. You need to raise the issue with your new provider.

Bear in mind that there are no more analogue phone lines being provided.

[CESIOUS]

Wow, that's missing the mark. If you read my post you'll have seen I was told many times by BT I would still be a customer, only stopping Broadband but keeping my Landline. No mention at all that that might be a problem. Of course I talked to Virgin about the whole thing beforehand and they were clear with their information i.e. Phone Line not available on full fiber yet.

[Keith_Beddoe]

@CESIOUS 

This is just a customer to customer help forum, everyone here, including myself, are just customers.

You have been told the wrong thing by BT, as any porting of numbers is down to the new provider.  Once you cancelled your service with BT, your number would have been lost, unless it had been imported by Virgin. BT would not be able to help with this now.

If you stopped your broadband with BT, then that totally ceases the service, as broadband is now needed to provide a phone service, as its carried over BT Digital Voice.

This type of issue has been reported many times on this forum.

[rbz5416]

You will probably be better off going to a VOIP service & hope they can port your number in.

Have you moved away from an Openreach based service?  If not, it may be possible to cancel that within their cooling off period & revert to BT. But getting your number back may be problematical.

[Keith_Beddoe]

@rbz5416 

It appears that @CESIOUS has moved to Virgin Fibre, and they do not provide a phone service, like many other fibre providers.

If they had moved to an Openreach based provider, then that provider should have been able to port the number in, provided it was left to the new provider, to inform BT, and do the transfer.

That is probably why BT said they could keep their number, as it was assumed that @CESIOUS  was moving to another Openreach ISP, and would be following the correct procedure.

[licquorice]

They can still move to a third party VoIP provider as @rbz5416  has suggested and port the number to them.

[rbz5416]

Confused as Virgin have always offered a phone service:

Maybe it's now only available if you also take TV? But that might still be cheaper than a separate landline with BT

[Keith_Beddoe]

@rbz5416 

The phone service was only available on their analogue service, which uses co-axial cable to deliver TV and Internet, but has a copper pair to deliver the phone service. Most of their network is still analogue, a legacy from when they took over many of the old cable providers.

[iniltous]

Was your ‘landline’ phone service with BT via DV ( phone  plugged into the router ) or still using PSTN and connected into the wall socket ? 
If it were Digital Voice which is IP , internet protocol , it needs BT broadband connection to work , if you remove BT broadband , then by default BT IP telephony ( DV) won’t work as you don’t have BT broadband …if you were told it would be OK then that’s obviously turned out to be incorrect, there currently is no way to get back to PSTN telephony once BT DV is provided.

…..out of interest , if you supposedly confirmed that you could have standalone telephony  , what was the difference in price  , as the cost of telephony on its own with BT ( for those BT legacy customers currently on telephone only ) is not that much cheaper than ‘basic’ BT broadband and telephony together , so basically if BT telephony and BT broadband can be had for £30 and BT telephony on its own is about £28 , it’s worth keeping the BT broadband as a back up to  the VM service ,

obviously those prices are guesstimates , but won’t be far off , so what price were you given for telephony only ?