4Com BT Upgrade costs

DukeOGinge

Hi All, need some advice please?

We are a small, one office business with four phone lines, through 4Com. They are trying to charge us £500.00 to switch two analogue broadband lines to the SoGea broadband service as BT Openreach are switching off the current network.

I understand we have no choice, but this also means we have no choice on the costs. Excuse the ignorance, but is this some kind of breach of service and can we do anything about the additional charges?

Thanks in advance.

MilesT6060842

Yes eventually you will have no choice to change from analogue (sometimes called POTS) to SOGEA broadband (which is really a carrier for VoIP aka Digital Voice).  

Are you in one of the exchanges which are in early stages of the change?  If you are not you may be able to defer this until you are out of contract, and negotiate the change as part of a renewal or find a new provider.

ispreview.co.uk has covered the ever increasing list of exchanges in the cutover programme, and the ongoing master list is here https://www.openreach.co.uk/cpportal/content/dam/cpportal/public/images-and-documents/home/products/product-withdrawal/stop-sell/Updated_FTTP_PriorityExchangeStopSell_v22_July_2023.pdf

Does your current switchboard support VoIP natively, or is the supplier providing/configuring ATA box(es) to translate the VoIP to analogue for the switchboard.

Contractually you may be forced to pay--need to read the very fine print.  But likely getting a new system compatible with SoGEA from another supplier will be same or more money. 

Also, if you depend on your phones during power cuts (e.g. need to have a working phone for safety reasons) then you will need to ensure that all the equipment (switchboard and new kit for SoGEA) has a battery backup, or get Openreach to provision a separate POTS landline (if you still can) as the "safety phone", and suitably signpost that phone to your employees.  Ditto check what is happening with any alarm lines/lift lines, which really should not route via your switchboard anyway (may be mobile technology already).

littleboo

Its a B2B service to you need to check the contract, you don't have the same protections as a consumer

DukeOGinge

Thank you so much for the responses, very helpful. Definitely need to check a few things now.

Appreciate the help.