New Digital Voice home phone service on BT

[Andy005]

I would say that you need the new handsets to take advantage of the features, such as two calls at the same time.

I use Signal Assist so in the event of a power cut it would be wandering around outside to make a call. Power cuts are rare but I would be more concerned at losing the internet rather than a landline, I think the majority would be too. When one of the mobile networks had an outage last year thousands went into meltdown 😂

[Keith_Beddoe]

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@Andy005 wrote:

I would say that you need the new handsets to take advantage of the features, such as two calls at the same time.

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This is awfully like the old Broadband Talk service, you could make multiple call over that.

Loss of Internet caused by household power loss, is easy to fix with a UPS, provided of course that the batteries in the cabinet do not fail, if you are on FTTC.

[tarbat]

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@Andy005wrote:

I've just peeled the sticker off my SH2 and plugged in a phone that's 25 years old and it works. I hadn't tried one before.

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@Andy005 , were you on the trial program, or part of the production roll-out? Maybe BT discovered problems during the trial leading to them now saying that you'll need to replace your phone with their special BT digital home phone.

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@Keith_Beddoewrote:
Bear in mind that if you have dial tone on your normal landline anyway, this would have been extended to that socket on the SH2.

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How does that work? There's no connection between the normal landline socket and the Smart Hub 2. Copper landline goes to the master socket, fibre goes to the ONT. I've plugged a POTS phone into the socket, and don't get a dial-tone, and I wouldn't have expected to until BT transfer me over the Digital Voice service.

I certainly won't be happy if BT force me to replace my DECT phones with their own ones just to get a voice service working.

[Keith_Beddoe]

I was really referring to an FTTC connection, where there may be a path from the copper line to the socket, not of course on FTTP.

[Andy005]

I've never heard of that service Keith but it doesn't surprise me that it had similar features. I'm sure though that someone far better than me would know the full benefits of Digital Voice.

I have the two call thing turned off as I have one handset upstairs and one down and there's only me in the house.

[Andy005]

My guess @tarbat is that the new handsets are needed to access certain features. I had Panasonic handsets and in my opinion, the BT handsets are good. They could be better in some areas but I could say that about any handset.

[tarbat]

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@Andy005wrote:

My guess @tarbat is that the new handsets are needed to access certain features.

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If that were the case, why are BT saying that we'll "need to swap your current home phone for our new digital home phone". Instead of "need to", surely they would say "may want to" & "to access additional features".

My reluctance to replace our Panasonic phones is because they have a nice big display and keys, voice annunciation of the callers name, etc. I also use a TrueCall call blocker to record and filter all calls.

[Keith_Beddoe]

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@Andy005 wrote:

I've never heard of that service Keith but it doesn't surprise me that it had similar features. I

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It actually first started a very long time ago, when BT first issued their own BT Voyager Modem 220V.

They had an extra phone socket which had a separate phone number where calls could be made over your Internet connection. Call quality could be set, and was very good.

This was continued with the Home Hub 1, 1.5 and the original home hub 2. They allowed multiple calls using the BT supplied handsets, the first handset was free.

The service was withdrawn many years ago.

[Andy005]

Just out of curiosity, any idea why it was withdrawn?

[garybs29]

Just to confirm the new phones will have call protect (one of them certainly has a big block button not sure on the others) & you will still be able to use old handsets they can be plugged in. Might not work with alarms etc though so advise on those is to speak to your provider

The handsets themselves provide HD quality calls & I've heard the difference & the sound is much better