Yes, i ported my landline number with TalkTalk to Soho66. They were the cheapest I could find. You'll either need to buy a voip phone, or something like a grandstream ata to make your old phones work over voip. I went ATA route so my Alexas can still announce who's calling me.

I was advised to do the port before cancelling Talktalk (the port effectively cancelled the contract anyway)

Thank you.

I've just signed up with A&A who seem to be a similar price to Soho66.

Now time for more shopping (VoIP kit)- my wife is going to kill me 🤭

I also signed up with A&A for VoIP after switching to BeFibre.

Very pleased with the service, they cancelled my service with Vodafone (out of contract) for my old FTTC broadband when I requested the number port. Didn't even have to talk to Vodafone. Went very smoothly.

Annoyingly one of the things the Adtran router does do well is support VoIP. I plugged my DECT phone into the first RJ11 port on the back, entered the details supplied by A&A on the VoIP setup page of the router, and it all just works. Incoming and outgoing calls work perfectly.

But having read this thread and relating to all the issues I'm seeing I think it's time to invest in a TP-Link mesh system.

Busted! Despite the mac cloning, BeFibre can tell it's not their router connected.
I was up and down (mostly down) on Monday, as were others with BeFibre on our estate. The ONT was in an alarm state.


"Hi there Mike,
Are you using your own router?
I'm afraid we cannot see a connection to the device we provided for some time.

Can you also let me know if your connection is still down and I'll escalate further.

Kind regards"

Still seeing a lot of slowdown from 9pm onwards of an evening but not sure they'll be interested unless I plug the ADTran back in to prove it's not my equipment.

Edited by mikeycrawford (Thu 21-Sep-23 22:12:58)

Hi Mike - just wondering if you've had any luck getting your setup back up and running?

I've been following this thread with interest as I'm currently considering a move to a FTTP arrangement from FTTC (Plusnet). BeFibre have the best value packages by some margin, but I really don't want to use their provided router.

From reading this thread, the mac-spoofing solution seemed to be the way forward and I was about to sign up for their 900mbps package. However, since BeFibre can apparently still see what it's not their router, I'm now wondering if they're likely to lock things down further.

Hi,

Made an account to comment. I've been a beFibre customer since November and up until recently had no issues. The last month however has been torture.

Every night from 6/7pm until midnight ish my 500mbps connection drops to as low as 0.3mbps I called and spoke to an engineer on Friday that assured me my router needed an update. He supposedly fixed it and I had to monitor it over the weekend. It is now Sunday and there has been no change.

I have a call back with them tomorrow to discuss the outcome and will post the results here after.
On another note their technician did mention to me that I can use my own router and just to let them know the mac address so they can add it. They were happy for me to use my own hardware.

Just had a response back from BeFibre after I inquired about the use of 3rd party routers:

"It is possible for you to use your own router if you want to, however, it will need to be set it up a certain way for it to be allowed on our network.

Unfortunately, we will also not be able to help with support on the routers we cannot see third party routers. Therefore, if a fault occurs our technical team cannot support unless our router is plugged in."

I don't know if this is a change in their stance or if they've just been unclear in the past about people being able to use their own equipment, but it seems as though they're not that opposed to it.

I notice the slowdown most from around 9pm until midnight. There are no latency issues, no packet loss, just terrible speeds. They gradually get better as the night goes on.

Spoke to the support team who gave me the support login for the router, I checked the updates and none have been installed since December so it seems that is something they say to people just to fob them off. Kind of like telling the customer to hit f5 when something isn't working on the computer..

He also let slip that something happened in one of their data centres that has had a dramatic effect on the lines nationwide and they are fixing them as they go along. He has passed me to their tech team now who are asking me to gather more evidence whilst they investigate the issue.

I will post results here once I get somewhere, speeds are still awful every evening.

Also if you can get the support log In for your router I would do so as you get so many more options. They did disclaim that if you break it using one of the "locked" options then it's tough luck.

I had my 900mbps connection installed on 12th of September. The engineer was really good and did a very clean and tidy job.
Since then I've been lucky I suppose, as I've had no issues at all. The speed does vary between 600 and 870mbps but most of the time is at the higher end of the spectrum. Overall, so far, I'm impressed.