Configure Yealink VOIP phone with VF SIP landline

[Quarryman]

Our Vodafone landland / broadband contract for a small business was up for renewal last month, which I renewed with a VOIP / Digital Voice service. I subsequently found out that the Vodafone call forwarding / divert feature which was part of our old contract was not available with VOIP / Digital Voice. Vodafone did advise that we could purchase a new VOIP handset, and use this to enable call forwarding / divert.

After some research I purchased a Yealink W70B Base Station (which connects to the Vodafone router via ethernet cable) and a Yealink W73P handset. Vodafone also supplied SIP credentials, in the following format:

Username: voi0017xxxxx
Password: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
SIP proxy: xbn.xx.bbvoice.vodafone.co.uk
SIP registrar: resvoip.vodafone.co.uk
SIP URI: voi0017xxxxx

In addition, Vodafone also supplied a static IP address.

My understanding is that the admin page on the W70B should be accessed, and the above credentials entered. However, to date I have been unable to get the phone to register. Our old phone does work when connected via a VOIP adapter into the back to the router, but this does not support call forwarding. We really want to get the Yealink phone to work; has anyone managed to install a similar set up? Also, what value should be used for "SIP Server" within the W70B admin page?

Many thanks

[Ripshod]

Let us know if you get this working. To date we have only succeeded in getting certain Grandstream devices and a couple of Cisco devices working with Vodafone's digital voice service.

There's a whole writeup of the process we went through to even get this far

https://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/Landline/Landline-phone-with-own-router-on-FTTP/m-p/2709457#M1354

It's safe to say the collective knowledge within these forums is vastly superior to Vodafone's. 

[Ripshod]

@Bigfluctuation has filtered and posted all the relevant info on github - should save some time:

https://github.com/mouldybread/VodafoneUKVOIPConfig 

[Quarryman]

Many thanks for that, will let you know how I get on 👍

[Jayach]

@Quarryman 

Are you on a business or home contract?

If Vodafone are selling business contracts without those basic features, it would seem to not be fit for purpose.

[Quarryman]

It is a business (golf club), phone set up "should" be simple, we have a single number and 2 x cordless phones in the clubhouse

[Archie07]

Hi @Quarryman , I am interested in this as we were thinking of moving to Vodafone for our business BB and landline. Having asked if Calling Features were available we were advised by one Sales person that they were but another advised they are aren't and you conform that to be the case.

However can I ask will the type of phone used to connect to the Vodafone Voip service make any difference to the availability of the calling features? Surely the calling features need to be provided by the Voip supplier so when Vodafone don't support them the type of phone used won't make any difference? Hope someone with better knowledge can advise.

I agree with @Jayach that this service offered to businesses is not fit for purpose and as the public are having these digital lines forced on them, there needs to be an awareness that this is not progress but rather a backward step. I don't know if this could be highlighted to ofcom.

[Quarryman]

Hi @Archie07 when it became apparent that call forwarding was not available with Vodafone Digital Voice, VF said that call forwarding would be possible with a VOIP handset that supported this feature, and it being controlled by the phone software. There is term used called "traffic trombone", so that when there is an inbound call to be diverted, there will be an outbound call to the diverted number at the same time. Vodafone have confirmed that their Digital Voice product does support this.

Call forwarding for the Yealink W70B / W73P / W73H is covered within the manual if you download it, p372 of 539. Despite having spent over an hour talking to Vodafone support today I am no further forward. The W73H handset is registered with the W70B base, but I cannot register an account within the Yealink control panel using the Vodafone credentials. I have now raised a ticket with Yealink directly. Not giving up yet...

[Archie07]

Hi @Quarryman thanks for update. Please keep us updated as to how you get on, be interested to know if you are successful. Strange that something so simple with old technology becomes so difficult with modern tech. Certainly not progress.

[Quarryman]

I have given up with Vodafone. Via a friend, I spoke to "David" from a 3rd party telecoms company who specialise in the SME sector. The MAC addresses for the Yealink W70B box was being shared with the VF router, which suggested that the issue was down to the credentials VF had supplied being incorrect in some way. David said he would have expected the server details to be IP addresses rather than DNS entries, although VF may have their reasons for this. However, both the Registrar and SIP Proxy Server values are not public (DNS lookup draws a blank). It may be they route internally through the VF network, but David said he would be surprised if this was the case. The net result is that I have spent a week trying to get everything to work and can't progress this any further. As I am still within the cooling off period I have now cancelled the VF contract and will start again from scratch. We may adopt a different approach, and either switch our main number to a mobile whilst ditching the landline number completely, or else retain the landline number (useful for public presence) but use a VOIP provider to route traffic onto a mobile. There are pros and cons with all variations, just need to figure out what is best.