I’m currently with Virgin for broadband, TV & home phone.

Due to the house growing up the 3 teenagers no longer watch the TV via Virgin, they use their laptops/PC for everything.

I want to move to just a Broadband provider, we have city fibre in the street that can give us up to 1000Mbps

BUT

The wife likes the home landline phone.

How can I make the landline phone an IP phone without the handset changing and keeping the call charges similar or free.

This must be possible but I dont think the providers want it to be easy. Before you say, tell her to use her mobile, she won’t!!!!!!

we did this

We use Gigaclear as a broadband provider, an old iphone 5s as the phone, Sipgate as the provider, and Grandstream Wave as the app to join the phone to the provider.

If memory serves, it cost £20 to transfer our number to Sipgate, but it’s free from then, if you do not make any calls. Definitely free to receive but you need to receive a call every month I think to keep it active

We basically only have it for the MiL, who doesn’t understand that calling a mobile is the same price as calling a landline.

Works fine though. Possibly a slight delay on pick up (confuses said MiL), but it’s one call a week, and not for me, so I don’t investigate too much.

http://www.circleloop.com

I used to work for them, it says “business telephony” but there were a few families using it domestically too. Free trial is easy to get started.

Unless I’m missing somehting – which is entirely possible, it seems to be pretty straightforward?

https://top5voipproviders.com/uk

virgin offer it, my phone is plugged into the back of my hub3. 300mbs broadband as well which is plenty for my two hardcore gaming sons and TV streaming wife.

The easiest thing to do is to replace the wife with a 21st century wife who does nothing but message 100 different groups of friends on Whatsapp. Cancel all services apart from broadband with Virgin.

Pretty sure my SKY telephone package is VOIP – all plugs into the back of the router.

Pretty sure virgin is VoIP by default. When we signed up we were explicitly asked if we needed the phone as an actual line for things like emergency call systems rather than a voip line.

The main downside with Sky/Virgin/Gigaclear is you pay (£10 a month or whatever)

If you don’t use the phone for outgoing calls, but still want one for people who have the old number, or those that trust a landline number, then is there any point spending the money?

hence the sipgate route. It costs nothing after the porting of the number. If you don’t want to port the number, it’s totally free

Course, if you want to use the landline to call out, the others are straightforward and probably a lot easier to set up

The advantage of an analogue landline is that you still have telephony if your broadband goes down in an emergency.

We basically only have it for the MiL, who doesn’t understand that calling a mobile is the same price as calling a landline.

is that true? assuming the MiL is dialing from her landline?

The advantage of an analogue landline is that you still have telephony if your broadband goes down in an emergency.

Depends why your broadband goes down. In my experience broadband failures are one of two things – a hardware fault at the exchange affecting all users, probably still leaving analogue phone OR a wiring/cable fault, which 9/10 kills the phone too. You’ll still have mobile either way.

assuming the MiL is dialing from her landline

Was for her, due to the ridiculously expensive BT package they were on.

Was for her, due to the ridiculously expensive BT package they were on.

It’s **** staggering what sort of ‘legacy’ packages some providers, provider their customers.

My Dad was complaining the cost of Internet when my Sister goes over the allowance. Which is a thing I didn’t think still existed in 2019 (when it happened). They were paying Sky £60+ a month, for a landline and ADSL, with some stupid cap, I’m sure it was it 500MB, but that seems too low to be true, anyway the bill was always over £100 a month.

Seems they signed up to it 10 years previously, and it had never been updated. They looked at me like I’d invented fire when I explained unlimited Fibre deals, my Dad nodded along, but Mum admitted he didn’t believe me at first, but didn’t want to insult me (being an IT consultant and all) so waited till I left to call Sky.

The next Week Mum asked me if £600 a year was a reasonable amount to pay for Car insurance for a 63 year old Women with 20 years NCD on a 1.0 Toyota Yaris “No Mum, it’s not”

Are you sure that was Sky?

Back when I signed up with Sky like 15 years ago they were the only provider in the country offering truly unlimited DSL Internet with no capping or throttling or traffic shaping or anything. Unless your folks weren’t in a Sky LLU area and it was BT Wholesale resold I suppose.

We basically only have it for the MiL, who doesn’t understand that calling a mobile is the same price as calling a landline.

We’ve been here before. It’s costing you £18/month for her ignorance. Ask if she’ll pay for your line rental and have it disconnected if not.

Sipgate here for 2+ years. Didn’t port the number, just programmed the new one into my the old people’s handsets. It’s been rock solid and the quality is perfect.

I had an old Polycom SIP phone so didn’t need to bridge the number via an app. I used it loads start of lockdown last year, but now it’s just the once a week call with the olds.

@cougar

It’s costing you £18/month for her ignorance

but that’s the point…it’s not. We use Sipgate, for VoIP. It’s free if it’s only incoming calls.

We pay nothing, she’s happy. Win win