Old landline and seperate fibre broadband line. How will digital affect all this?

[jj09]

I am struggling to understand what is going on here.

I have the original landline fitted when the house was built and around my house there are 3-4 wall sockets I can plug a phone into e.g. kitchen bedroom etc. The main socket is in the garage.   A couple of years ago I had fibre broadband installed with a completely seperate line running to my house with a cable going around the house to the entry point and a slab of white plastic wall thing ( is it called a router) connecting device,  then a BT smart hub connected to it in an upstairs bedroom.  My desktop computer connects to this with a wire to the hub and a wire to the computer as it is not wifi.   My other devices use wifi to connect. 

Will I be able to run the new digital phone system system off the router thing?   Is there any way I can link my wall phone sockets to the router thing?

[imjolly]

this Guide may help answer your questions

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

[iniltous]

Its not entirely clear, but I’m guessing that you had a FTTP ( fibre to the premises ) ‘line’ installed , the white plastic ‘slab’ presumably being the ONT ( optical network termination ) , many who had this continued to use the copper wiring and sockets for telephony and the ONT was just for broadband…if you have now been advised that your phone service is being moved onto DV ( digital voice ) then your landline phone will no longer use the copper pair but will be accessible by plugging a phone into the phone port on the BT router…..

if you have extension phone sockets around the house they can be re-wired to be usable from the DV platform but as extensions are not your ISP or Openreach’s responsibility, it’s likely a much easier solution would be to abandon those sockets and just use cordless landline phones ( DECT ) , BT ( generously in my opinion ) will provide these on request.

You cannot connect a phone to the ONT ( even if it’s an old style ONT that has a phone port ) it needs to be the router phone port , the one on the ONT ( if fitted ) is for a discontinued service from Openreach.

[jj09]

Thank you for taking the time to help me (lady aged 76) .So I am right if I get a digital phone and plug it into the BT hub 2 then I could use adapters in the original sockets in bedroom and living room but not the master one which will be useless.

[imjolly]

If you get a free digital phone from BT it is cordless and you can use it anywhere in your home.

If you get a digital voice adapter then that plugs into an electrical socket not phone socket and you then can connect your existing phone to the adapter and continue to use current phone 

BT normally give option of phone or adapter free

[licquorice]

No.

The new digital phones supplied by BT are cordless, you don't need to plug them in anywhere, they are just like any normal cordless phone except the hub is now the base station.

As I said in the FAQs post, if you really must use corded phones you can either simply connect the green socket on the hub to any of the old sockets with a double ended cable after disconnecting the incoming wires in the master socket.

Alternatively, you can just plug an adapter(s) into any mains socket and plug a corded phone into it (them). No need to use any of the existing sockets at all.