No way to connect landline phone to Vodafone hub ?

[duncan61]

I have just moved to Vodafone Pro from BT fibre into the house. 

I have BT essentials cordless phones BT Essential Digital Home Phone | BT Help

which have no socket to connect to the hub.  Do I need new phones ?  I do not have phone wall sockets.

From information gathered on the forum, it appears that I can't use my existing phones, but need new ones that have to be connected physically to the V hub.  The hub is in an inaccessible cupboard & I would not want a phone in there.  Any thoughts would be much appreciated.  I have contacted V, but didn't get anywhere useful.

Many thanks Duncan

[TinmanBJJ]

@Jayach yeah that is the one I ordered. For the cost i thought it was worth a try and its got me ip and running.

[CrimsonLiar]

BT (& EE) are very much muddying the waters though, as they also have cordless phones that are currently only usable with their own digital voice service.  Not all the phones sold by BT & EE are created equal!

[TinmanBJJ]

Agreed.

The whole DECT system was new to me and thought that VOIP just operated on standard WiFi. 

[Jayach]

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@CrimsonLiar wrote:

BT (& EE) are very much muddying the waters though, as they also have cordless phones that are currently only usable with their own digital voice service.  

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I am really confused by the BT phone options, They sell DECT phones that only work with the Home Hub 2 (because it has the DECT base built in), but DECT phones should be pairable with any DECT base. How do they get away with it?

If someone has bought a BT DECT phone, and later they move to another ISP, they should still be able to use that phone (if only as a basic phone) by pairing it to a new DECT base. 

But apparently that's not possible. Am I missing something?

[TinmanBJJ]

Hi @CrimsonLiar 

Im not 100% certain that you can’t pair the BT phones to other ISPs routers if they have DECT. 

The issue with the Vodaphone router I had was that it didn’t have DECT. I worked around that by plugging in a DECT base (the BT Elements) to the router and then pairing the phones to that.

As this worked, logic would suggest that the BT phones will pair with a DECT router but not all routers have that functionality / technology.

I would have purchased new WiFi / VOIP phones, but like others I suspect. I didn’t want the phone base to have to be next to and plugged into my router and wanted it to wirelessly connect. I couldn’t seem to get any straight answer as to what technology would allow that.

[CrimsonLiar]

BT now sell several landline phones that are "HD" and only compatible with BT Digital Voice via their SuperHub 2.  They still sell regular DECT-compatible phones which should work with the VF router, but even their latest essentials phone is not compatible with systems other than their own - earlier essentials handsets were dect compatible - the technical term for this is a mess!
If you want to muddy the water on this, you'll have to go a long way to beat BT!
So a BT phone may work or it may not!

[CrimsonLiar]

Looking back in the thread the identified "essentials" phone is one of the HD BT Digital Voice only products - it's not a DECT phone!

[Jayach]

The  BT Essentials phone identified in the opening post is DECT, and is GAP compatible, so it "should" be possible to pair it with any DECT base. I believe it is the one included in certain of their broadband offerings. (but that may be wrong) 

The DECT base is built into the BT hub..

https://www.bt.com/content/dam/bt/help/digital-voice/BT_Essential_Digital_Home_Phone_specification.p...

[TinmanBJJ]

I think the issue, certainly my issue, was the phones would not connect to the Vidaohone Pro Router. This seemed to be caused by:

• the BT phones are fully cordless and do not have a wire to plug into the Vodaphone router
• the Vodaphone router does not have DECT.

You are correct in that the cordless phones can connect to DECT based and I have done this by using the BT Elements base which plugs into the Vodaphone router and creates a base to connect to.