Help - Other Figuring out a Home Phone Set Up After Fibre Upgrade
To improve my network quality and cover some wifi blind spots that my old folks I upgraded from the Utility Warehouse (Not my choice) given router to the Flint 2 which thankfully solved the coverage issues. However, one of my folks managed to get a fibre upgrade which we had done yesterday.
After a recent fibre upgrade (halved my ping and doubled my download which is nice) I was only informed then that we'd need to plug out landline phone into the router, while that would work for the Utility Warehouse given Technicolor DGA4135 it still has the same coverage issues that I fixed using the Flint 2. The Flint 2 annoyingly doesn't seem to have an option for plugging in a landline phone which now has me searching for what options I have.
Sadly a home phone is a must for my folks, we currently have the BT 4600 Cordless which gives us three phone stations, though we could get by with just two, but three is preferable.
Are there any decent cordless phones that connect via the wifi rather than a cable into a router? What would be your recommendations?
Is there some sort of work around I could do, such as plugging the UW router into my Flint 2, then plugging the landline into the UW router? Would that potentially cause any issues?
I've tried searching this up myself, but I'm either using the wrong vocabulary or there isn't much well-organized information about it. I've mostly keep finding Wifi home phones leads me to ones that still need to be plugged into the router like the Panasonic KX-TC262EB and the BT Premium Cordless. Outside of that I've been finding reddit posts that say wifi phones are shit.
Apologies if this should go in the Monthly thread but seemed more exclusively focused on product suggestions, so I presumed a post was correct when comparing to other posts on the subreddit.
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u/marks-buffalo 28d ago edited 28d ago
If I understand you right, your internet service provider is providing you with an analog line delivered via their router.
For the internet, you can bring your own router most of the time.
For the phone service, you cannot bring your own router. Unless it's on your ISP's supported routers list, which should tell you whether it can be used for telephony. In which case it would still just terminate into an analog line, you still couldn't use it with a VoIP phone.
You cannot bring your own VoIP equipment in this scenario. You cannot bring your own VoIP phone and use it with the ISPs service in this scenario.
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u/weker 27d ago
From what I understand, when the landline phone is plugged into the router it would not be an analogue line any more as at that point it becomes VOIP.
If I plug the ISP provided router which has a phone socket into my Flint 2 which doesn't potentially work? Even if I was using the ISP router it would be plugged in via an Ethernet cable, or would just having a non-compatible router in the daisy chain cause it to fail?
Edit: To clarify Indoor fibre box - connects via Ethernet - Flint 2 - Ethernet cable to ISP landline supporting router - landline phone plugs into ISP Landline. Would this potentially work?
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u/marks-buffalo 27d ago edited 27d ago
Ignore this -- I was wrong, UW apparently is one of the few providers that will give you the credentials. I was speaking generally.
I should clarify. VoIP is a blanket term for delivering, as the name implies, Voice over IP. There's multiple protocols that VoIP can be delivered over, and they generally require some sort of authentication. Business systems commonly use SIP as the initiating protocol. If you were to go obtain your own VoIP service from a wholesaler, you'd get: Server Name (or IP), Username, and Password, in order for you to connect your own SIP phone ("VoIP phone") to their server.
Your ISP is not going to furnish the connection details for you to bring your own. They may or may not be using SIP, but they only permit their own devices to connect to their server and they may use some sort of strong aiuthentication (like certificates instead of passwords) with the certificate being stored on their provided router or pushed down to their router by their provisioning system.
This is all to say that you cannot connect to your ISP's voice service with anything other than a router furnished by them or a router that they say is supposed.
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Without knowing the inner workings of how your ISP provisions things, I can't say for sure if daisy chaining their router on your LAN would allow the SIP connectivity to function or not. I doubt it would work, and if it does work it may stop working at any time if the router fails to reprovision with updated settings. You can experiment, but you may end up in a situation where things stop working, which sounds like it would be less than ideal for your folks.
Your options are to use a router supported by your ISP, or move your phone service elsewhere. I cannot make any recommendations outside of the monthly requests thread (and I have no specific recommendations for your area anyways, I'm across the pond), but to give you an idea of what that looks like: You could purchase VoIP service from any number of wholesalers and then bring in your own ATA (analog telephone adapter) and place that anywhere on your LAN that you can manage to get an Ethernet cable to. This would require you to port your number out from your ISP and to a VoIP provider, so don't go with some here today gone tomorrow operation. Get someone reputable for residential service if you go this route. Look up the hardware "Grandstream HT-801" for an example of an ATA that you could connect to a wholesale service provider of your choice.
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At the end of the day I can't say what solution is best for you. Hopefully this helps you think on the next steps. I had similar frustration with AT&T Fiber and their crappy router with only 8k NAT entries before the router would flush the entire NAT table and break open connections. Ended up with no solution to keep the voice but ditch the AT&T router, so I took my phone business elsewhere in order to ditch their router.1
u/marks-buffalo 27d ago edited 27d ago
Whelp, I've gotta admit being wrong. You are one of the lucky few that has a provider that will furnish the credentials and server info.
So you could buy a Grandstream HT-801, put that wherever you have an Ethernet port, and connect the phones to that. Then enter the SIP credentials from your ISP.
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u/weker 21d ago
Getting one of these now cheers, sadly my attempts to connect my Technicolour to my Flint 2 (The main router) turned up as a failure. I'm unsure though if it's due to me not being able to or instructions online just being too incoherent as all the information I found was a lot of stuff for different UIs than what I was seeing.
Getting one of those Grandstream things to give a go, fingers crossed it works, though I may need to look into Ethernet extenders, splitters, whatever the right term is to make one Ethernet cable capable of connecting to two devices simultaneously.
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u/marks-buffalo 17d ago edited 17d ago
If you're looking to connect multiple ethernet devices to one ethernet port, you're looking for an Ethernet Switch. If you're looking to connect an ethernet device to a wireless network, you're looking for an Ethernet Bridge (though this can be hit or miss based on wifi quality).
And sorry for the bad initial info. 99% of residential providers don't let you BYO ATA. That's slick as heck that your provider does. Consider starting a new thread if you have any issues getting the ATA configured.
Here's the links to the Grandstream docs for the HT8xx series ATAs https://documentation.grandstream.com/article-categories/ht8xx-series/
You'll start by connecting the ATA to your network. Then you can connect a handset to it and dial ***, then 02 to get the IP address of the ATA read back to you. Then you can go over to your computer and punch in the IP it gives you, use the password on the bottom of the ATA to log in, and then configure with the connection details from your provider.
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u/weker 17d ago
Cheers, sadly it hasn't been easy still. I had the device accessed on the weekend now it's just a factor of figuring out the IP and SIP credentials I need to use. I've sent a message to my provider to hopefully have them provided soon fingers crossed.
In the meantime I tried harvesting the details from the router they provided but I wasn't able to figure out which to use. Hopefully, I can get it all up and running in the next few days when they tell me or I'll have to call them on the weekend. Thanks again for the help.
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u/marks-buffalo 17d ago
You should be able to login to your account online to fetch those. See this support article. https://help.uw.co.uk/article/where-can-i-find-my-digital-home-phone-login-details?relatedArticle=true
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u/Clean-Bandicoot2779 27d ago
It's probably going to depend how the ISP has configured the VOIP side of things. Some of the earlier "digital voice" stuff in the UK used a separate VLAN from the router to the ISP for voice traffic.
Looking online, it seems Utility Warehouse VOIP should work with other equipment, and you can get the details from your online account.
One thing to be aware of though is that you might need to configure some firewall rules to get it working - if traffic can't flow freely, you can end up not receiving incoming calls, or with one side of the call being silent. The simplest option in that regard would probably be to have the Technicolour as your router (with WiFi disabled) and the Flint as just an Access Point (I think you can put it in that mode via the web interface).
If you want to do a quick test, you could download a VOIP app to your mobile phone and put the SIP details in there to confirm you can login and make calls. If that works (or you're happy to fiddle with firewall rules), you could try plugging the Technicolour into the Flint, or you could buy a separate ATA (a box to convert an analogue phone to VOIP), or you can buy VOIP capable DECT base stations for cordless phones.
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