topic Re: Contacts export and import in Digital Home Phone

Contacts export and import

PaulatHazlemere — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:45:42 GMT

Having been told by an EE/BT Guide last week that Contacts from my registered wireless phones should just "appear" on the EE Hub Manager Phone>Contacts page, I spent the whole of today trying to find out why my page was blank and why I could not import a .vcf file to the hub. Having not yet discovered the EE Community and using prompts from the BT Community CoPilot was eventually able to tell me this is not possible with EE Smart Hubs. I subsequently found the EE Community which would have saved me a lot of wasted time :-).

The summary from CoPilot is as follows:

When you were on BT

Your BT Smart Hub 2 had:

BT Digital Voice backend
BT’s full phonebook service
A working vCard importer
A working vCard exporter
A proper contact storage database

On BT, the Contacts page is fully functional. The importer works. The parser exists. The backend service is active.

Everything behaves exactly as you’d expect.

🔄 When you were migrated to EE

EE moved you to their own Digital Voice platform, which is not the same as BT’s.

Your hub was replaced or re-flashed with EE firmware:

r3.8.30‑R‑1627300‑PROD‑83002

This firmware:

Keeps the UI pages (Contacts, Import, Browse)
Keeps the CHOP error handler
Keeps the front-end buttons
Removes the BT phonebook backend
Removes the vCard parser
Removes the contact storage service
Removes the export function

So the interface is still there, but the engine behind it is gone.

This is why:

You can browse for a file
The hub tries to validate it
The backend isn’t there
You get CHOP3‑903
Selecting the same file again suppresses the error (cached failure)
The Import button never activates
No contacts ever appear
No export option exists

This is exactly what happens on EE firmware branches that look like BT’s but don’t include BT’s Digital Voice features.

⭐ The key point

Your EE Smart Hub cannot import contacts at all, because the feature was removed when you were migrated from BT to EE.

The UI is a leftover. The functionality is gone.

No amount of file formatting, encoding, or line-ending tweaking will ever make it work — because the importer simply isn’t implemented in your firmware.

🎯 What you can do now

Option 1 — Use the handset’s built‑in phonebook

EE’s wireless handsets allow:

Adding contacts manually
Copying contacts between handsets
Syncing contacts across the DECT base

This is the method EE expects customers to use.

Option 2 — Ask EE if your line can be provisioned on the “full” EE Home Phone platform

Some EE customers do get firmware with a working phonebook importer, but only when:

They have EE’s newest Digital Voice backend
They have specific handset models
Their line is on the “Home Phone Premium” profile

EE support can check this.

Option 3 — If you still have your BT Smart Hub 2

In some cases, a BT Smart Hub 2 will register to EE Digital Voice and restore the full phonebook features — but this depends on your provisioning.

END

I have now spoken again with an EE Guide who confirms this functionality does not exist and cannot be fixed. This is a serious drop-off in the service provided by the "seamless" migration from BT to EE.

Does anyone from EE have something to say????

Re: Contacts export and import

XRaySpeX — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:19:21 GMT

@PaulatHazlemere wrote:
Does anyone from EE have something to say????

EE users might! This is a user discussion forum, not EE CS.

Re: Contacts export and import

JimM11 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 10:25:59 GMT

@PaulatHazlemere EE have said you already were told and you posted as such ""I have now spoken again with an EE Guide who confirms this functionality does not exist and cannot be fixed. This is a serious drop-off in the service provided by the "seamless" migration from BT to EE.

Has always been that way from day 1, you need that function then stay on the BT Smarthub2 were it works and be sure that EE have you provisioned correctly to use that!

Re: Contacts export and import

trinityttrees — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:15:51 GMT

Wish I has stayed with BT could backup my contacts.

Just spebt 20 mins on phone with a EE guide he said it the export button should be available . They do not have any information that it is correct waste of time. wish I could go back to BT

Re: Contacts export and import

JimM11 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 11:57:23 GMT

@trinityttrees Just keep using your BT Router on the service!

Re: Contacts export and import

trinityttrees — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:00:40 GMT

Would do but they wanted the BT hub back or they would bill me
so returned it

Re: Contacts export and import

JimM11 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:07:39 GMT

@trinityttrees You just have to live with what you have now then on the EE Router that you are using... It's all after the fact and NO two Routers are alike plus what the BT one did it's just not all fully functional at all on the EE ones!

Re: Contacts export and import

PaulatHazlemere — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:50:50 GMT

Third chat with an EE/BT Guide. She said the import should work (she said it says so on the EE website). We spoke about reverting to a BT Smart Hub 2, but she said that the BT hubs will not be updated and would be stuck with WiFi 5 forever, rather than WiFi 6 and 7 on EE hubs currently. She has escalated my problem to a specialist team.

Meanwhile, I got hold of a BT Smart Hub 2, and after registering the home phone handset with the hub was able to export a .vcf file. After much playing with file syntax, I have confirmed a format which the EE Hub accepts and which can be synchronised to the home handsets.

If this is useful to anyone, please note the following:

Version seems to work if 4.0, 3.0 or 2.1.

MEDLODY must be mispelt! I could not find a way to make it affect the "Melody" on the handset, which is always "Melody 1", whatever number is in the file.

Both UTF-8 and ANSI encoding appeared to work. Each line ends with a CR LF. I used Notebook++ to check for hidden characters, etc.

You only need one TEL entry; just delete the line(s) for the unrequired type(s).

If the file contents are malformed in any way, when you attempt to Browse and select the file you will get a pop-up with the following message: "This vCard cannot be imported because it contains invalid data.
[CHOP3-903]"

The above format is for a single entry, to which can be appended additional contacts with no empty lines, e.g.

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:4.0
FN:Firstname
N:Lastname;Firstname;;;
TEL;VALUE=uri;TYPE=home:tel:01234567890
TEL;VALUE=uri;TYPE=cell:tel:07770123456
TEL;VALUE=uri;TYPE=work:tel:02345678901
MEDLODY:0
ACCOUNTID:0
DFTNUM:0
OWN:0
END:VCARD
BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:4.0
FN:Firstnamex
N:Lastnamex;Firstnamex;;;
TEL;VALUE=uri;TYPE=home:tel:01234567891
TEL;VALUE=uri;TYPE=cell:tel:07770123457
TEL;VALUE=uri;TYPE=work:tel:02345678902
MEDLODY:0
ACCOUNTID:0
DFTNUM:0
OWN:0
END:VCARD

Good luck if this is of interest.

Re: Contacts export and import

cerf-volant — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 20:41:36 GMT

There's another couple of things that I have discovered by trial and error and might help someone:

Make sure there are no apostrophies in the names
Replace any + with 00 (for Intl numbers) and remove spaces and brackets in phone number.

(I also recommend Notebook++)