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:
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:
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????
