Step 3, and email 3 - received at 02:43 on 12 November.

You're good to go

Hello,

It's the moment you've been waiting for: your Digital Voice home phone service is ready. Read on to find out more.

Set up your phone service
Your phone line has gone digital. To make and receive calls, you'll need to plug your phone into your Smart Hub. You'll find the phone socket at the back of your hub on the bottom left (it might be covered by a sticker). Please also unplug any phones from the wall sockets, as they won't work anymore.

Naturally, I didn't leap out of bed at three in the morning to re-wire my house.

Lift phone handset, hear normal dial tone - so work can wait. Start morning chores, some shopping, a bite of breakfast: then down into my work-room when I felt awake enough to complete the job properly. Remove old face-plate, connect old wiring to newly modified face-plate, plug patch cable between router and wall assembly, test with calls to/from cellfone. All extensions are working - job done by about 1 pm. About 2 pm, my frequent caller rings - first successful outside call.

And shortly after that, the ambulance crew arrived at my door...

Piecing together the fragments after the event, although I heard dialtone on the landline on Friday morning, it wouldn't accept a dialed number ("The number you dialled has not been recognised" - standard message on UK phones). My frequent caller had rung me during Friday morning, and - presumably - heard a standard ring tone from my not-yet-connected VOIP adapter. And I didn't answer...

Panic set in. She drove (or was driven) to my house, knocked on the front door, and didn't get an answer - probably because I was down in the workroom wrestling with the wires. [Jord has seen my house, and the distance between the front and back doors. There's a story behind that, too.]

And being a caring sort of person, she visualised me lying unconscious - or worse - on the floor. And called the ambulance service. They gave me the standard tests, found enough outside normal range to warrant further tests, and carted me off to hospital: it's their job, and hard to argue with when you're surrounded by three of them, all asking questions at the same time. Hospital kept me in for 'observation' overnight - actually, I was probably watching them more than they were watching me - and then let me find my own way home by taxi. I'll keep taking the tablets, and I've got an appointment to see the doc in a couple of weeks to see if they've worked.

And I've also registered the salient points of the tale with British Telecom as a complaint. If VOIP is going to be the national solution for the future, they're going to have to put a lot more work into their implementation of the changeover.

Panic set in. She drove (or was driven) to my house, knocked on the front door, and didn't get an answer - probably because I was down in the workroom wrestling with the wires.

So, since all your lines are digital now, you can add a camera upstairs, maybe even a Ring or Ting setup with camera, that beams a video output onto any device you want. And that way you can hear the bell being rung wherever you are, even if you're not home when it's output to your mobile, and talk to the person outside from wherever you are.

Then that distance between the front door and back door - and which one is your front door? The done downstairs? - with all the head bumps and differences in ceiling height are no longer a problem. :-)

I've got two front doors :-)

Upstairs is a house - two up, two down, end terrace - typical vernacular architecture for the mid nineteenth century in these parts.

Downstairs - the void beneath my neighbour's house - was once a shop, selling fine-art wallpaper and decorator's materials. Not exactly what you'd expect to find in a small Yorkshire village.

The narrow passageway linking them, with all the steps and head-bumps - ah, that's the stuff of village legend. But for another time.

Hope that you're OK now Richard.
Just the sort of thing you need when chasing electrical problems.

My place is just coming up on 100 years old, but mid nineteenth century is impressive.
Although, I guess not for England.

And I it thought you were a village legend!

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that you are OK, even a bit frustrated by BT's level of (in)competence.


(and good luck with the complaint)

---

Sometime located elsewhere in the (un)known Universe
But most often found somewhere near the middle of the UK

Well, my house is certainly a village legend. Have fun with this photo of my 'downstairs' front door, taken several decades before I bought the house. Think British TV soap operas...

Richard, At least you are back home, of sound mind (?maybe?), your unexpected health issue(s) were addressed and until BT has a new screw-up things are working.

Richard, At least you are back home, of sound mind (?maybe?), your unexpected health issue(s) were addressed and until BT has a new screw-up things are working.

Yup, that's a fair summary. It's fun and games like that that keep us young, and out of the funny farm.

Seems BT no longer cares about older people who do not have or want an internet connection or mobile phone or live in and area (like my late father did) that had no reliable mobile signal or it seems care about what Ofcom states.

"Under guidelines laid down by industry regulator Ofcom, BT must ensure customers can contact emergency services in a power cut that lasts more than an hour. But how this can be achieved if you lose access from an internet phone line or do not have a mobile phone – or signal – is not clear. "

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-10198081/BT-warned-phone-shake-puts-vulnerable-risk.html


Also it would appear that I will have to bin my expensive gaming router, as the "Digital Voice" only works with the new BT hub. I have not used a BT hub in well over 2 years and have no intention of starting now.

Seems it might finally be time to drop the landline and look for a new ISP.[/url]

I recognise those arguments. Back in the 1990s, I was self-employed, and advising small community organisations on their emerging technology needs. My primary concern was with stand-alone computers and local area networking (no internet at that point), but I got drawn into conversations about telephony as well.

This was a time when small electronic switchgear was becoming available and affordable. The regulations were that every installation had to include a defined number of 'power fail' sockets, that would remain operational on the old POTS (exchange-powered) network to call the emergency services in the event of, say, a fire or a mains supply failure. Several times, I encountered systems where the sockets were provided but no POTS handsets were available (or nobody knew where they were). The electronic PABX handsets wouldn't work on a POTS line.

Bernie - what's the current status of those regulations?

Things must be pretty bad in Canada for this to occur...
Canada Taps Strategic Stockpile Of Maple Syrup Amid Shortage

Loving that according to David's post SU is affected by the latest Windows/expired certificates saga :)

That's the point that David doesn't seem to appreciate yet. SU relies on [a working] BOINC client. Moving to SU, so users can't whinge, moan, and generally hold his feet to the fire doesn't absolve him from the responsibility of continuing to maintain BOINC.

That's the point that David doesn't seem to appreciate yet. SU relies on [a working] BOINC client. Moving to SU, so users can't whinge, moan, and generally hold his feet to the fire doesn't absolve him from the responsibility of continuing to maintain BOINC.

+100

Okay, I feel sorry for you guys in Britain that you have to sustain this on the radio. Where's the time of good music around Christmas?

Interesting Veritasium video about Analog computers you never heard of.

Let’s take a look into the future of a "Help Desk operator" in Christmas 2031... El Reg style
On Christmas night, a computer logs a call to say his user has stopped working…

Lesson learned. When using an electric log splitter stop before you think you need to. They are **&^% heavy to move and put away after you have finished!