ISP recommendations: Internet access AND keeping your landline

AndyD_OHD

Hi All,
Thanks for any advice in advance.
We are with Plusnet and have only recently welcomed the arrival of faster internet arrive at our village. At present our uploads are about 10Mbps. We would like to purchase a faster broadband subscription but we also often make calls to elderly family in Europe.
We would like to retain our present number as that is what family are familiar with and so wondered whether we would need to find an ISP that offered both a landline and broadband package to be able to retain our landline number and line itself?
Would we still be able to use a phone and number through VOIP by some means?
The internet method of communication is often fraught with connection issues either our side or on our relatives' side.

Neil_Jones

AndyD_OHD said:

Hi All,
Thanks for any advice in advance.
We are with Plusnet and have only recently welcomed the arrival of faster internet arrive at our village. At present our uploads are about 10Mbps. We would like to purchase a faster broadband subscription but we also often make calls to elderly family in Europe.
We would like to retain our present number as that is what family are familiar with and so wondered whether we would need to find an ISP that offered both a landline and broadband package to be able to retain our landline number and line itself?
Would we still be able to use a phone and number through VOIP by some means?
The internet method of communication is often fraught with connection issues either our side or on our relatives' side.

Find a provider with Digital Voice (which is not going to be Plusnet because they won't be offering it) and see if you can migrate the number that way.

If you want to keep the existing arrangements of copper line and FTTC/ADSL, and you're in an FTTP only area, you're sort of going to be a bit stuck, as there is no provision for that legacy arrangement.  If you're not in an FTTP only area you can migrate in the normal way - pick somebody else and sign up with them, but your post suggests that won't be an option.

Somebody will probably be along in a while re: VOIP solutions, which is basically what Digital Voice is, except it's slightly more complicated porting around to other companies.

molerat

My daughter moved from TalkTalk ADSL with phone line to Sky FTTP with digital voice.  OR installed the fibre - removed the NTE5 faceplate, fitted the ONT to the existing backbox and plugged the existing phone into the back of the router, still has the same number - seamless transition.

iniltous

Most moves between providers work perfectly well, it’s the case though that things done as expected rarely motivate the customer to mention it on forums such as thus , on the other hand, when things do go wrong , people tend to shout about it from the rooftops, so a casual observer may get the idea that things go wrong the majority of the time , if these type of  ‘reviews’ are the only thing they have to go on , 

matelodave

we've had digital voice for around five to six years, first with BT, then Vodafone and now Zen all of them have been seamless transitions using the same phone number that we've had for fifteen years.

All three have provided routers with a phone socket in the back which means no faffing with additional adapters, no extra mains sockets and no requirement for a separate VoIP provider.

We have a 1996 vintage BT Duet 200 plus phone plugged in as well as our Panasonic DECT answering machine base station with three portable handsets all of which have worked with all of the supplied routers

In fact our present Zen router (Fritzbox) has answering machine facilities and can be used as a DECT base station (it works but we use our Panasonic).It also allows my mobile phone to use the digital voice network when we are at home - its a clever piece of kit. 

I don't know what others suppliers offer but so far we've never had a problem