Moving from BT to EE with Advanced Digital Home Phone with Alexa

[garywood84]

I have recently moved from BT to EE for broadband and digital voice. Although EE sent me a new router and smart wifi devices, I have retained my original BT Advanced Digital Home Phones with Alexa. 

I've re-registered these phones to the new router, and so they are working to both make and receive calls.

However, the Alexa function is not working: when I press the Alexa button, or try to access Alexa Settings from the phone's main menu, I see "Alexa is not available" on the phone's display.

Anyone else experienced this issue or know of a solution, please?

[garywood84]

@Storm500 But why would that be the case? There must be something about the EE router that "gets in the way". What can that be, if not closed ports?

[Storm500]

There’s a lot of posts on the BT community about using and setting up third party routers with digital voice  and the BT Hub has to be first to pick up digital voice as the third party router won’t pass digital voice through. They also give information on how to setup the BT first with the third party router second.

Your case is different as you have effectively 2 BT routers so which ever one you have first takes digital voice and won’t pass it through to the second. Digital voice is BT’s proprietary version of VOIP and for security the BT/EE routers don’t allow digital voice to pass through. So you will have to choose which router to use.

[garywood84]

The plot thickens. My complaint handler at BT/EE escalated the Alexa issue and has heard back from senior managers who (a) didn't know or expect the Smart Hub Plus to be incompatible with Alexa on the phones; and (b) are not aware of any issues arising with this service.

The complaint handler is investigating further and will contact me again on Wednesday, but it's interesting to have this feedback along with that of EE on Twitter, which claims the Smart Hub Plus is incompatible with the phones' Alexa functionality, and the 150 support agents who claim that it should be working, and advise me to phone Amazon!

[AML4]

I have had problems with my digital phones since switching to the smart hub plus. These seem to have been resolved except no Alexa. I have multiple Alexa devices in my home which are all up and running but as said earlier no Alexa on my phone. I therefore presume i have no problems with Amazon and my smart hub plus or my broadband.  The tech team who have been sorting out the issues on my phones said it was a line problem which they needed to fix externally. This they  seem to have done except for  the non Alexa. They are going to contact me on Thursday re the digital phone issues. I will report back what they have to say about the non functioning Alexa. I am not very good technically and am very much regretting switching from bt to ee as I have had no problems with my smart hub 2 and my digital phones previously. They have functioned very well for over 2years with no problems. Sent from my Galaxy

[garywood84]

@AML4 Thanks for the update mate.

I'm in the same position with Alexa, and am getting mixed messages from EE. Some of the team there say they are getting a lot of calls about this but their "workflows" don't include a solution, and I should contact Amazon; others, including the EE staff in this forum and on Twitter, say the handsets are not compatible with the Hub, Alexa won't work, and there are no plans to make it work; and the Executive Complaints team says that senior managers are unaware of a problem and believe it should work!

In due a call from Executive Complaints again on Wednesday with a further update...

[redjasper30]

I have the same problem as the one you've described above, my BT dect handsets no longer work for voice with my new EE hub.

I can see that the fix is to use your BT Hub as well, but I've sent that back to BT at their request.

Any idea if there is there anything else I can do to fix the situation?

[mountain-goat]

I have spoken to BT support re Alexa not working with the EE Smart Hub Plus towards the end of last year having had weeks where the BT handset just didn't work, (it does say on the box that the phone only works with BT Hub2 but with the new relationship BT/EE you could expect compatibility with the EE hub), and there was an EE 'relationship' engineer in their office at the time and they said Alexa was planned to be working with the EE hub sometime in February 2024. It took quite a few weeks before EE got the BT phones working properly.

[AML4]

Similar tale. My digital phones now work but one of their people told me there are no immediate plans re AlexaSent from my Galaxy

[Graham-SB]

I have the same situation, apparently EE do not have a licence for Alexa, even though they are now part of BT, you would think that BT would have included this in the cooperation and ensured the Digital Voice Service was maintained for the benefit of those using it.

[XRaySpeX]

@garywood84 : Are you plugging your BT Advanced Digital Home Phones with Alexa base station into the phone socket on the router or the adapter, or are you using it over DECT to connect with the router's inbuilt DECT base station?