topic Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone in Digital Home Phone

BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

WillKirk — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 03:06:52 GMT

Been a BT customer for quite a number of years and had the pleasure of having a perfectly working Digital Voice service since switched.

A couple of days ago I phoned up and asked to change to the New EE as that’s the way things are going now and thought I would give it a go.

Have the new Smart Hub Plus and ever since I have had no phone service. The hub states Not Configured.

Swap back to the BT Smart Hub 2 and it appears immediately, shows phone number on hub, phones work when paired and dial tone.

Back to the Smart Hub Plus and stubbornly stays on Not Configured.

All I have talked to at EE over the phone are confused by this (once they get passed the: what does it do when you try to make a call? How many handsets do you have? Silly questions when they have already been told that the hub is showing no VoIP Service).

The case has now been ‘passed up’ to [some acronym] team but so far I have had no confirmation, proof or evidence really that this true and I’m not being left in the lurch because they don’t know what to do.

Seems to me that the Smart Hub Plus obviously has buggy software but, what do I do? Because no one seems to know what to do when the service is obviously being provided (as with other hub it activates) but nothing they do from within EE kicks it in on the equipment they have provided me…?

I haven’t paid my first bill yet and I’m thinking perhaps holding it to ransom will get me nowhere but I will be paying £12 a month for unlimited calls on a service that simply doesn’t exist (from the consumer standpoint).

Anyone know of anything similar and any solutions to this? A clever hit with a hammer in the right place, or twist of blue wire to red wire to Hotwire Digital Voice into life?

That aside I’m also disappointed with the lack of configuration backup and restore and the lackluster event log on this new Plus router… the font could do with changing too. So close to Comic Sans it hurts a little inside when I see the GUI 🙂

But back onto a serious note… I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do at this point as it’s not in my nature to lay down and be fobbed off but instead to ‘get it fixed’.

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

XRaySpeX — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 03:39:54 GMT

Also missing are DNS config & DDNS.

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

Christopher_G — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 07:55:22 GMT

Hi @WillKirk

Welcome to the community.

It sounds like you have done the right thing in speaking with our technical support team. They follow a troubleshooting process, which may involve escalating to another team. It sounds like this is what has happened, from your description.

Did they say what the next steps would be?

Chris

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

Schockwave — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 08:27:27 GMT

Hello @WillKirk ,

Welcome to the community,

Did you request to keep your phone number, by any chance? I hope you did, otherwise you would have to request it.

We are mostly customers like you and so can only help thus far.

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

JimM11 — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 10:07:17 GMT

@WillKirk Please be aware that all of your DV system information is stored on the BT router if your are using any of the BT smart advanced phones, AND you have the ability to get all of this information off before you take the drastic measure of the EE router again. IT has the ability to restore from your BT and once done, you can NO longer backup this info, one off the downsides of the new EE router. So if you require, backup the DV NOW on your BT Smarthub2, if you need help doing so post back, or look on the BT forum. There is a difference on how the EE router will be configured for the DV voice and has to be done by EE dumping to that router, so hopefully they will advise you when/if to put it back, you do not want to keep jumping back and forth between BT/EE router's as it will drive you crazy.... Hope that you still have DV at present on your old system?

Edit: And you are in the area on the forum where you can read all of the potential problems that hopefully you will not endure should you make a decision, and one will be welcome to EE no going back now to BT!

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

fennie561 — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 17:50:43 GMT

Hi.. yes.. ive had more issues with DV since the switch than anything else.

First.. you need to plug in your old BT router and de-register every handset. setting it back to factory defaults isn't enough.

Then, plug in your new router and register each handset.

that got me a dial tone...😀

BUT - its taken 2 days before the call will actually be connected AND some of the handset features (such as change the ringing tone) are "not avialable at this time"...

AND... I've been double billed by BT and EE for the same month!

Seriously??

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

JimM11 — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 17:54:56 GMT

@fennie561 Billing cycles are when they happen, money should be returned to you from BT as you are paying in advance, but do watch for the return payment, mistakes do happen!!!

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

WillKirk — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 12:56:02 GMT

Hello. @Christopher_G - I have been told that they must leave it alone for 5 working days and then someone from some acronym will attempt to fix it and may or may not contact me - in the meantime there is no reference or record for me to refer to, I am just waiting in limbo with a product missing that I am supposed to pay EE for. Strange way of doing things.

@Schockwave - no, this is the same phone number as was with BT and has been since he 1960s when the phone line was put in. Everything 'account wise' has been moved across and it looks on my account as if Digital Home Phone is up and running, apparently all looks fantastic — except for the fact that the hub says it doesn't have it.

@JimM11 - I have backups form the Smart Hub 2, including configuration backup, contacts backup, and a network export for reference. All useless for the Smart Hub Plus as it neither has a backup nor restore. I mean admittedly, they don't specify what is 'plus' with the router. Could mean: Smart Hub Plus, we have taken away some features.

@fennie561 - Unfortunately the handsets have nothing to do with it. If they did I would have no problems. The problem is the hub doesn't recognise there is supposed to be a VoIP Service in use on this line, despite what my account says, or the fact that I have had a working one all the way up to swapping over to the Smart Hub Plus.

@JimM11 - in regard to the billing, they have also charged me twice for the same month, in that BT billed me early September and EE have billed me late September, so I have cancelled my direct debit and shall address this manually as I simply don't have the money available to give to them twice in once month — them being BT Group, or BT and EE separately combined — I simply can't do it, so they will have to wait for their first payment, especially as I am majorly inconvenienced by their losing of one of my existing services.

I am trying to be patient, but to be honest, I am not very impressed. How hard is it to literally move nothing but basically the billing details from one computer system to another (which is what the process entails), as the services themselves are all using the same BT infrastructure it was using just a few days ago. Yet whoops, there goes the entire VoIP service and no one at EE appears to know how to make it work. They have even opened a complaint, then closed it saying: there is no more EE can do, it is now up to the 'supplier' - and I'm thinking, who are they if not BT/EE? When I asked, the question was dodged.

My unfortunate prediction is that nothing at all will happen and I shall end up simply not paying them and they can they argue that will me. My hope is that they will throw the metaphoric switch and turn my home phone back on, thank you very much.

Also much confused by how I add any add ons such as the WiFi Enhancer as there appears to be no 'add this add-on' button when you follow the links, just an informative page on how you can have this add on if you add it on. Thankfully I don't need it, but if I did… hmm. My main focus is, give me back my home phone, or you won't be getting your money — I'm not going to pay £12 a month for an Unlimited Calls package for a service you are only pretending to supply. "Well, our systems say it's okay…" except they forgot to supply it to the customer.

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

JimM11 — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 13:16:03 GMT

@WillKirk It's a mess that hopefully will get sorted for you, and you are well in control from your posting, no doubt tech support will need to get back to you and get the EE router online to sort your DV control, just looks like an oversite on the EE side of things. Restore is available only for your DV side, nothing else, and zero future backups once you restore, not the best for a router, and if you need to do hope the app does not give you any issues, or can see you sending it all back. Not sure how BT does it, but EE is e-mail your bill, and take payment 7day's later. 👍

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

fennie561 — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 14:06:05 GMT

Quick comment.. did you de-register the handset from the BT hub before you disconnected the hub?

I did a factory reset of the handset but had to re-connect the BT Hub and de-register each handset before re-connecting the EE hub and then connecting the handsets - i must say I did this to humour the call centre agent - didn't think it would work but it did!

HTH

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

WillKirk — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 14:39:10 GMT

The situation has now been resolved as of today (so in all took 15 days). The back office team (or offline team) did whatever they did and it registered then on the hub as configured with my phone number and everything came back as it should.

From discussions with certain people at EE/BT it seems that my original theory was correct, which is something worth watching out for.

If you were swapping from BT to 3rd Party Provider, and moved your Digital Voice, then the number would be ported, the service let go etc etc. If you then moved from 3rd Party Provider to EE, they would do the same again. However, as BT/EE for all intents and purposes are the same 'network' the service didn't actually 'move' anywhere. And as you can only have one phone number associated with one service, but there was no actual 'moving' of services, the Digital Voice was configured to connect to a BT Smart Hub 2 and knew no different. For all it knew (as far as systems can know anything), the BT Smart Hub 2 had simply been turned off and would be turned on again soon. The EE Smart Hub Plus obviously has a different identifier, but runs exactly the same otherwise. So sometimes, that identifier isn't changed from (for example, let's say:) BT to EE. This needs to be done by engineers that have access to those more technical systems — whether they do it all their end of if they have to SSH into the router itself, I have no idea. Once it is basically 'released' from the identifier hooking it to the expectation of the BT Smart Hub 2 it allows the possibility of another compatible device.

I suspect, with no evidence but only thought, that it really is something as simple as a reference code like: BT or EE and they change one little bit and hit restart and it all falls into place. A bug within the programming as not everyone has this issue when swapping between the two.

Hopefully it will be fixed in future iterations for their eventual migration of all BT Consumer/Residential customers to the EE company branding.

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

Timo11 — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 16:27:56 GMT

Had the same issue when I received a new EE hub.

To connect your existing BT digital phones to your new EE hub, do the following on your phone

Press Menu, then settings, scroll down to register phone, press, then press WPS on hub for 2 seconds, phone will then sync. Job done.

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

fennie561 — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 17:06:19 GMT

Sorry.. it really isn’t that simple.. you have to de-register your handset from the BT Hub (even if you’ve done factory reset).

it’s not documented anywhere..

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

WillKirk — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 17:40:37 GMT

Yeah…. No… funnily enough the handsets have nothing to do with it as they are DECT from the hub outward.

The issue was the Digital Voice Service from EE’s network ‘inward’ to the router. Handsets are irrelevant as they could be registered, not registered, off or on or thrown in next door’s bin, it makes no odds to the VoIP traffic coming down the line to the router.

Anyway, solution was as said and all other issues experienced with Digital Voice on Smart Hub Plus appear to be down to dodgy software - changed back to BT Smart Hub 2 and everything runs perfectly as it did before they sent me the oversized buggy Plus.

I also give an educated assumption that most people’s problems since moving to EE are likely caused by the buggy hub and a change back to a stable router such as the Smart Hub 2 would solve a lot for them too.

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

JimM11 — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 18:12:39 GMT

@WillKirk From your analysis EE DV Service is working fine, the BT Smarthub2 connected proves that, the problem is the EE Smarthub+ Router only, if i am not mistaken...

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

WillKirk — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 18:23:08 GMT

Yup, that’s correct. So the issue, all issues I have been having with it, are down to the digital voice service between EE and the hub. That’s what I mean when I am referring to ‘that side’ rather than from the hub outwards to the handsets.

The service being provided by the EE is likely sound, but when it gets down the line to its endpoint, being the hub, it gets screwed. The output from there is then unreliable.

As the Smart Hub 2 works perfectly, the firmware is definitely the issue in the Plus model.

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

gwe47 — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 07:55:35 GMT

I am having a similar issue. Changed over to EE from BT coming up to 2 weeks ago. The Smart Hub Plus I'm quite happy with otherwise, as its WiFi performance is very good. However, I haven't had a voice phone since the switch. Hub Manager simply says "not configured". Initially the problem was the new contract did not include digital voice, but now that has been amended (which they insisted required that they drop the broadband speed from 900 to 300 "temporarily", which has happened), they still haven't been able to get it working. After a couple of promised call backs not being made, and long waiting times to speak to anyone, I am getting rather annoyed at EE.

I haven't returned the BT Smart Hub 2 yet, so will give it a try to see if DV still works on that.

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

fennie561 — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 09:24:04 GMT

Good that you’ve got the bt hub. If DV does work then you’ll need to de-register the handsets. This is critical as factory reset of the handset doesn’t de-register the handset. I know this repeats what’s I’ve said before but it’s a long thread. Good luck!

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

gwe47 — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 11:52:48 GMT

OK thanks, sorry for the delay replying. I reconnected the SH2 but it would not connect to the broadband, and shows digital voice as un-configured now. I was able to use the handset menu to de-register the handsets, but it has not helped. Handsets are now re-connected to the new EE router, but still show a message "no voice service on hub". The problem seems to be that the EE Smart Hub + is not configured for digital voice. Looks like another call to EE is in order 😭

Re: BT to EE and no Digital Home Phone

JimM11 — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 12:30:09 GMT

@gwe47 If you http://192.168.1.254 web manager to the EE router, you should be able to see the state of the DV system.