Mobile phone for elderly parents which will be their main phone.

elsien

If they already use DECT cordless phones, they can use those with an adapter.

Bigphil1474

OP, if they have broadband they can usually get a landline type phone (voip) from the same supplier anyway. Probably cheaper if it's part of a bundle. You need the internet for a VOIP phone, so you are not gaining much by looking elsewhere.

We still have our landline phone which now plugs into the back of our router directly rather than the old BT socket. From a use perspective, it's no different. We got my dad a mobile in his later years, and he ended up putting it in a drawer and never using it.

elsien

although the benefit of a mobile is that VoIP don’t work on the landline phone if there’s a power cut. A mobile gives a Plan B.

SOGEAnamey

Whatever you do, there is a huge benefit of call-screening against electronics contacts list [those not on the list have to say their name and so-on!].

Mobile is cheapest, for example TalkHome-EE have deal for 3.15/month indefinitely unlimited UK-calls
https://mobile.talk-home.com/sim-only-deals/offer/mse/290
So far as mobile call screening is concerned; I understand that "new" android will come with call-screening and iphone does already on updated/supported IOS.


Cheapest VoIP seems to be AAISP's SIP service for 1.50+VAT/month + cheap payg call-charges, choose your own equipment. You do NOT have to use AAISP internet, etc…

However, this does not provide any call screening function, that needs to be provisioned separately, for example, register an ATA on the service to get a phone-socket and then ebay source a "BT 090632" set to plug into that, use bluetooth to link to mobile-master-phonebook which then makes the screening work correctly. You might need to set "0" [normalize UK CLIs] in AA control pages for the VoIP number.

For a turnkey/fixed-rental solution, Phonely want 15 pounds a month instead and screen at their end against phonely call-book which hopefully can synch with mobile via Phonely-app …. and this includes UK calls.

No "easy" answers, unfortunately.

armith

I know that this thread is a couple of weeks old and you may have already made the decision but here's what I ended up doing for my parents. It's not the cheapest - but it does provide a simple "landline-like" service. The are now signed up with Zen Internet - for £40.50 a month, which, I know, is not cheap - but it's still around £15 a month less than they were paying Plusnet for their landline and broadband.

The features of the Zen service that were most appealing were:

• The router - a FritzBox! (the name has an exclamation mark at the end, which I'll not use from now on). It has a built in DECT base-station. This means that there is no need for a separate adapter (ATA). I just paired their existing two cordless (cordless, not mobile) phones with the router and they notice no difference in using them. The only change is that they can both make an outgoing call using these phones at the same time.
• They have 1000 outgoing minutes per month to UK land and mobile lines - this is over 16 hours a month, hopefully this is enough.
• I can remotely access their router from my house. This has two uses. One is that they can ask me to look at who called them when they were out (tried to show them how to do this themselves but they find it easier to ask me!) and I've put a USB drive into the router so we can exchange documents and photos simply.
• Their telephone number is still their old 01204... number that they've had since 1974.

There's no call screening like some of the other suggestions in this thread have included - hopefully my "trust absolutely no-one" advice will be OK.

A lot of this is up to the router - it's a FritzBox of some description. Some other companies might offer similar router functionality, with built in DECT - or you could use a cheaper provider and buy your own FritzBox - but I wouldn't know what settings to make it work with other providers.

As I say £40.50 for a 100 mb/s service and very land-liney (Digital Voice) phone isn't cheap. In the past Zen have had better customer service than most telecoms companies, it's still not particularly great but at least it's UK based and quick and easy to access. There's no annual price increase though so at least they know what they're paying for the next 2 years.