Voipfone

Was looking to get fibre, hesitated when I realised I may lose the house phone.

Mtpy wife has Alzheimer’s and I have some DECT phones suitable for hard of hearing, wanted to use these.



I ended up gettting the whole lot from Voipfone.

I have a voip adapter , which the phones plug into.
I realised after that the new router has maybe similar built in, but it’s all working fine.
The old copper lines had been a bit unreliable.

Your router would probably not have been any good. The phone adaptors on routers are for Digital Voice - certainly for BT and probably for many other ISPs. Digital Voice is subtly different to VoIP, but to the extent that they are actually incompatible. This is, IMO, a failure of regulation by Ofcom.

I am not entirely sure I am understanding this post correctly but as I read it it's bordering on misinformation.

"Digital Voice" is BTs branding for their service that delivers you dial tone out of their hub. Other ISPs have adopted this branding as well, and often if you take a phone service from a broadband provider then you are required to use their supplied router/"hub" and cannot configure a third-party VoIP provider as the settings are not exposed to the end user, but the statement "the phone adaptors on routers are for Digital Voice" is too broad.

A router that you buy yourself that has a phone socket on and advertises itself as having a built-in ATA like a lot of Fritzbox, Zyxel, Technicolor, TP Link, DrayTek etc. models will often work perfectly fine with a service such as Voipfone. Examples that A&A have produced documentation for are on this page.

In reply to a post by Stonechatuk:

The old copper lines had been a bit unreliable.

We have FTTP, but still retained the copper for phone (not likely to be an option now), the call quality on copper can be atrocious at times. Come end of present contract will look at dumping the copper.

In reply to a post by jpm:

I am not entirely sure I am understanding this post correctly but as I read it it's bordering on misinformation.

That is bordering on inflammatory. OP clearly states that their service is with Voipfone and will be VoIP. I clearly qualified my statement as referring to BT for certain and other providers as likely.

You are obscuring the serious point here that it is a failure of regulation to have different technical standards for digital telephony which favour a bundled market. VoIP is not available from BT, which means that you cannot run your phones over existing wireless or wired ethernet. Instead of using your internet infrastructure, this backwardness means that the consumer must maintain DECT or wired infrastructure quite unnecessarily.

I have used Voipfone for the past years. It has worked fine. Voipfone were very helpful in resolving a problem I had initially.

Do you mean SIP rather than VoIP? There is no protocol or set of standards called VoIP. Cisco SCCP is VoIP but it's not SIP, for example.

BT would probably argue that if they were forced by regulation to open up access to their voice service by providing the SIP credentials (assuming it even is SIP, there is no clear information available that this is the case) then they should be exempted from the regulations that require e.g. access to emergency services because they cannot account for end users configuring their devices incorrectly, and I think they'd win that argument.

There is a phone socket provided on these devices where existing handsets or extension outlets can be connected if required, I don't think regulation needs to extend to telling each CP that they must maintain SIP endpoints for their consumer voice services, there is a healthy market of providers that you can go to if you have this requirement.

BT DV is a ring-fenced SIP implementation. Can recall discussing some of the security aspects in a thread here somewhere with @kitcat a few moons ago if I’m not mistaken.