Digital Voice and Fall Pendant

Hello Experts,

Been a while since my last post but was hoping someone here could help me prepare for the Digital Voice switchover for my elderly mother.

She has PSTN voice with BT, FTTC with Zen and a Pendant fall alarm.

I also have a point to point VPN setup on her router to mine for easy remote access (Draytek 2860s).

I'd like to move her to Digital Voice early to give us more time to get it right but finding information on it is proving difficult.

Could anyone recommend what steps to take? I'm guessing we'd need to collapse the voice and data services to one provider and have a plan on how to connect the Pendant alarm to the router.

Any help or advice greatly appreciated.

I would suggest the first thing to do, if you haven't already, is check with the manufacturer that the control box for the alarm is VoIP compatible. If it isn't, arrange for it to be upgraded or replaced as appropriate.

You don't have to have the same digital voice supplier as broadband supplier. There are advantages to keeping them separate, see this recent post. If you set up a VoIP account with a 3rd party supplier, you could test out the alarm connection using an ATA box before changing anything else. If you take a broadband/digital voice combo from some ISP, the voice connection, however provided, will likely be locked to the ISP's service, and you may have to take their router and not be able to keep your Drayteks and VPN setup.

Does your Zen broadband come with a phone number, even though you apparently don't use it? Will Zen allow you convert it into a broadband-only (SOGEA) connection? A year or so ago Zen wouldn't let me do that, one of the main reasons I left them. Sooner or later they will have to provide a path for existing customers to make this change.

You should be able to port the existing BT phone number to a 3rd party VoIP provider, if that's important to you/your mother.

Rather than doing pendant -> ATA -> VoIP -> internet and all the moving parts that entails, see if there's an option to change the base unit to one that is IP-enabled, optionally with an LTE backup.

E.g. https://www.tunstall.co.uk/our-products/product-cata...

This would obviously be better, if possible. The OP didn't say what make the alarm is. My Mum had Tunstall kit with several sensors, but this was 15 - 20 years ago and I'm not up to speed with what they do these days.

My Mum's setup was provided as part of a home care package by social services/NHS somehow, I forget the details, so there wasn't the freedom to pick and choose. These days you probably can''t get anything like this provided by social services, and even if you can it's unlikely to be the top-of-the-range models with mobile backup etc.

I notice MSM are picking up on problems with Digital Voice, not sure if these are widespread 'real' problems actually being experienced by loss of power and/or internet, or just the normal Daily Fail rubbish.