BT FTTP With Digital Voice - Alternative to Smart Hub 2

I have BT full fibre broadband with an ONT on the wall and digital voice - phone is plugged into the Smart Hub 2 (which of course, is plugged into the ONT).

To cut a long story short, I don't want to use the SH2. I want to use my own router with an alternative way of getting voice.

Can someone recommend a medium to high end router which has multiple SSIDs, DDNS, good security and management, etc. etc. plus a VoIP ATA to plug into it?

More importantly, please tell me how I implement it all and how I get the digital voice service to work once theSH2 is back in it's cardbaord box.

Many thanks.

You can only use BT Digital Voice with the supplied BT Smart Hub 2 unfortunately.

There is no 3rd party router capable of doing this.

As has been said with BT Retail services you have to use the SH2 for Digital Voice, BT will not provide connection details for a third-party ATA.

I don't know if you can obtain the credentials for the WAN connection, if so you could use a third-party router plus another provider (e.g. Sipgate, AAISP) for a voice service but it would be a different number.

Porting the phone number to a proper voip provider such as .Voipfone is what I have done. For DECT the Gigaset N300IP works well with Gigaset phones such as tthe C430H. For wired phones there is the Cisco SPA112. They are more complex to configure but VOIP providers may well proovide configuration instructions.

Aside: it has been suggested you could set up a port on your router as a PPPoE server and plug the BT HH into that - so that it thinks it's talking to a BRAS via ONT - then assign it a private IP which you NAT.

In principle you wouldn't even need to know the PPPoE credentials: you could point it at a RADIUS server with a "permit all" policy.

This is getting pretty advanced to configure though, as you're basically becoming a mini ISP, and you'd need a fairly sophisticated router. Mikrotik should be able to, also pfSense and Ubiquiti.

This also assumes that the HH does its voice directly over the Internet, and not via some out-of-band mechanism like a separate tagged VLAN on the ONT. Putting a switch with mirror port between the HH and the ONT and sniffing the traffic should show what's going on.

Porting a BT landline number to VOIP will cease the broadband.

WhysoComplicated

I think ( 5 years since I was involved) that the BT Digital voice uses a separate VLAN to keep the quality high and prevent contention with ordinary usage. It was going to be controlled by the same tech that mobile calls use. (In a BB outage calls could be routed easily straight to your mobile!)

If you want to use a different router get a new number from a voip provider and set the new router up using that Voip service. Do not try to port the BT number just don't use it, keep the SH2 in a cupboard for future (emergency use).

+ 1 @ candlerb

During the last lockdown I built a pfSense box which does my firewall and all the routing and lots more too.

I think ( 5 years since I was involved) that the BT Digital voice uses a separate VLAN to keep the quality high and prevent contention with ordinary usage.

They can (i believe they do) use 802.1P priority tagging to ensure VOIP traffic is treated with a higher priority over ordinary usage.

In reference to www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/helpandsupport/sins/sins/downloads/SI...:

2.3.9 Upstream priority marking
CPs can (optionally) prioritise upstream traffic from the CPE to the ONT by marking
their traffic with IEEE 802.1p markings in a VLAN. The GEA-FTTP service supports
four upstream queues that are served in strict priority order
Queue PCP markings
3 6 & 7; Highest priority, served first
2 4 & 5; served after queue 3 but before queue 1
1 2 & 3; served after queue 2 but before queue 0
0 0 & 1; Lowest priority, served last

VOIP on SOGFast (and probably SOGEA) can be done in much the same way.

Edit: just read this in the FTTP SIN which i hadn't come across before.

2.1.5.2 FVA Downstream Priority Marking
FVA services have been allocated 802.1p value 7 (highest). This, in combination with
mapping FVA Service Flows to the highest priority queues throughout the FTTP network,
ensures that FVA traffic is scheduled above network management and GEA Data traffic.
FVA traffic is allocated the same priority upstream and downstream.

Although FVA is no longer sold it would make sense to treat VOIP traffic from the hub the same way.

Edited by j0hn83 (Fri 06-Nov-20 21:57:57)

Why not port the number?

I moved two BT VoIP numbers to port5060 fairly easily.