Phonely -Has anyone else had broadband cancelled after porting a landline to Phonely?

Mcasey100

Phonely ported my elderly father’s landline number from EE on 11th Feb. On the same day, his Plusnet broadband was automatically ceased, leaving him without both phone and internet.

Plusnet and EE have both confirmed that porting a landline can trigger broadband termination because it relies on the same underlying line — even when broadband and phone are with different providers.

Phonely, however, refuse to accept this and keep insisting the services are “separate” due to being separate companies and their port request couldn’t have caused it. I cant believe they can operate a telecomms company and cant understand this. A simple Google search will show them that some broadband lines require a phone line to run.

He relies on this connection for telecare, and we’re now facing reconnection fees, delays, and significant disruption. At no point were we warned this could happen.

They are slow to respond (close every evening at 530pm and now for the weekend) and I ahve to face the challenge of getting them to accept that their actions caused this on Monday and then try to get them to accept they need to recompense me. As of close of play yesterday (Friday) before they disappeared for the weekend, they said they could not guarantee any payment. I have already spent about 5 hours on this over the last couple of days trying to find out info about this.

Has anyone else experienced this with Phonely? or anyone else?

Any hints or tips would be great

Woodstok2000

So you cancelled your landline, but didn't realise your broadband required it? Frustrating, but I'm not sure its Phonelys fault.

Ayr_Rage

To be brutally honest I cannot see that Phonely have done anything wrong.

You certainly aren't due any compensation as far as I can see, they have done what you asked.

Whoever ordered their service did not appreciate that all other services associated with that number would cease, unusual in this case that phone and broadband were with different companies, presumably over an old copper phone line which is now deactivated.

Did you ascertain that your Telecare equipment was compatible with Phonely's digital voice service prior to requesting the number to be ported?

Going forward you may find that you cannot revert to a copper phone line for phone and digital voice becomes the only option and you may need to upgrade the Telecare equipment to work with that.

As the phone number is now with a digital voice provider and not an ISP you may have issues trying to move it away from Phonely.

If you get broadband restored then from what I can see you should be able to access the phone number by connecting whatever Phonely provide or sell to you, to the router.

As for Telecare, ask them what the equipment you need to continue with their service.

J_B

Quite a few years back, we were on Plusnet 2Mbps copper ADSL, so we subscribed to a WISP service and phoned Plusnet to cancel the broadband but keep the landline.

Sadly PN failed to tell us that they don't do 'landline only' and cut us off without telling us.

Luckily BT managed to get it back for us

iniltous

Plusnet are moving away from offering telephony to anyone , and as part of that they advised existing customers , if they wanted to keep telephony, they were to be moved to EE , that allowed them to keep both services but under one company EE , after the switch , the customer would no longer have anything to do with PN , if the customer wasn’t bothered about keeping telephony they could call and ask to stay as Plusnet broadband only customers, this is happening currently and has been for quite some time , I suspect this is what has happened to you so I think you have it wrong about you being with EE for telephony and Plusnet for broadband , but that’s not really important.

As far as you losing broadband and the associated mess , I dare say Phonely will say it was your responsibility to check if porting the number would cease the broadband, if you had asked on here , or on the EE customer forum you would have been told that it would cease the broadband as the EE account was for both services , moving telephone from EE ceases the EE broadband, and unlike some companies that can arrange to supply both broadband and telephone so you don’t lose broadband , Phonely only do VoIP telephony , so you need a standalone broadband service from someone else , to access the VoIP number that they supply .

Its unfortunate but this is really down to you not checking the ramifications of moving the phone service, although if you asked Phonely and they said it’s fine , that kind of suggests your choice of provider for the phone service was misguided from the start .

leveret

I don't think it's reasonable to blame the OP for not being fully familiar with all the technical details required to understand the national car crash that is coming up with Digital Switchover of the phone service.

Too late for the OP now, but it is in fact entirely possible to port out a voice number without ceasing the broadband line; the Openreach process required is called "Renumber with number export" as explained by Adrian Kennard of A&A here:
www.revk.uk/2016/04/number-porting-broadband-and-voip.html

Personally I am gobsmacked that Plusnet have decided to cop out of providing digital voice, even though the Hub 2 router has a voice port, and I suspect there are going to be a lot more Plusnet customers ending up unwittingly losing either phone service, longstanding phone numbers, broadband or all three over the next 12 months.

I have only just discovered this myself, in the process of figuring what we need to do to ensure that Aged Relative's Careline and regular support calls can keep happening. Until I started research I assumed that Plusnet would simply convert existing users to Digital Voice, as BT do with the same router, and as my own ISP Zen are doing. No, this is apparently too hard for what was once one of the more technically capable ISPs.

It doesn't help that this is not headlined either on the Plusnet sales pages, nor the Plusnet customer service portal for logged-in users. It would be quite possible for the technically unskilled user to upgrade to FTTP and lose their voice service as a result. Even if, knowing in advance that there is a problem, you then search through their sales site, then depending what links you click on you might either get sent to Plexatalk or to EE as alternative providers.

Now we all know that EE are longstanding price gougers, and also have opaque terms like all others in the BT group, so that's not really a great option for me to move Aged Relative to. Plexatalk involves adding yet another service provider into the mix, and one of whom I've never heard either. Why cannot Plusnet just badge Plexatalk's service and provide an integrated and uniformly billed Digital Voice service like more clued-up ISPs, making a seamless transition for the less technically skilled customer, I cannot imagine.

</rant> :-)

littleboo

Plusnet has now long been the no-frills brand of BT Group - no mobile, no TV, and now no landline. I can't seen any reason why re-badging a 3rd party product would make any sense whatsoever, they can steer customers who want a landline to EE or BT packages.

In my opinion, elderly or vulnerable people who rely on a landline should get a service from their ISP so that its fully managed up to the port on the router. In a situation where there is a problem, its one throat to choke.

Not all Careline systems will work with VOIP, has the provider said it will?

leveret

Hi @littleboo, yes there's much in what you say. We did get an email from Plusnet asking to ring their support line for upgrade options but nothing to indicate why or any urgency about it. There's a scrolling banner on the member portal but only one out of the six things it shows is about retaining one's voice service. So I did some digging so as to be better informed myself.

From my searching around, I came to the conclusion too that ATA voice ports are unreliable for care systems. EE Digital Home Phone cautions that any such device must be plugged directly into the Hub and not into any other ATA on the network.

Careline365 themselves (who Aged Relative is with) offer a replacement "digital" care hub that seems to be IP-based rather than classic POTS so I am thinking we will go with that. It's an expense but only a one-off and should increase reliability, rather than blocking up the actual phone when in use.

SOGEAnamey

How has this been resolved (if it has), in the end? Presumably Plusnet had to re-instate the line as SOGEA with some delay, and new internet Telecare box was connected?

Essentially the "big" ISPs are not really interested in providing internet/SIP telephone numbers and relying on this is not a good idea. Analogue ATAs and routers with analogue ports may not remain readily available to ISPs and be increasingly awkward to source, and the service does not have a good support cost/margin.

I am not happy at the 'process' for this situation where there is no clear safeguards either for the broadband to go automatically to a holding-state notifying the ISP it must be SOGEA/SOTAP'ed to retain it, any number port-out could have been automatically 'renumber and port out'. Eventually a process was instigated so that cancelled phone numbers go into a holding state for 30 days and can be rescued to a VOIP provider, but this was not sorted out before national stop-sell.

I would say Phonely ought to have a checklist they check with you if any phone number underpins broadband, however. Both they and OpenReach could make this easier.

I wholeheartedly endorse the recommendation to get any important geographic phone number moved to AAISP VOIP or another like ICUK, Phonely, etc — independent of consumer ISPs. There is no easy answer.The article from AAISP does not surprise me; https://www.aa.net.uk/etc/news/october-25-news/

Notice "We apologetically announce that we will be raising the price of our SIP number services.". "Support of lesser-technical users who have been forced to migrate, and then need help setting everything up makes it difficult to make the service – originally conceived and priced expecting only highly technical users - profitable"