On 15/07/2025 15:23, Terry Coles wrote:
All this was OK, except that the company no longer sells landlines, and Lynn prefers a landline, over a mobile (she also often forgets to charge her mobile). The upshot was that the new contract comes with a digital phone connection (VOIP by any other name, except we get to keep our landline number).
I thought I'd post a follow-up to my original message on this topic. The changeover took place just over a week ago and by and large is OK apart from one major issue. I'll come to that in a moment, but to clear up the Digital Phone Line question, I've decided to not bother with the UPS and simply ensure that we always have at least one mobile phone fully charged, which is much cheaper than a GPS.
A good policy, you may think? Well, perhaps, except that while most of us were away for the day on Thursday, EE and others had a major landline outage. My wife, who was still at home, had a mobile phone with a faulty battery, and so we couldn't get in touch. In any case we couldn't have called her anyway, even if we had a UPS because the landlines were down at the ISP level;-(
The one major issue is that the EE Smart Hub Plus which is provided as part of the package, has a habit of dropping WiFi connections temporarily, which is quite irritating. I had thought of substituting our old Netgear Nighthawk Router, for it, but if I do that, then the landline won't work. It seems that the Smart Hub Plus has custom hardware or software which prevents it working with standard VOIP phones, so beware.
I have pondered whether it's worth relegating the Smart Hub Plus to being a modem only and then connecting the Nighthawk to it to act as a WiFi AP. There are two issues putting me off; first, I haven't got much space in the area near the house's master socket to place the two devices together and secondly, I may have to keep the Smart Hub Plus WiFi going to enable the phone adapter to pair with it. If I do that, I'm liable to get interference between the EE WiFi and the Nighthawk WiFi.
So mixed results. The broadband connection to EE is fine; if anything, faster than our old Plusnet one. The EE Smart Hub Plus leaves a fair bit to be desired apart from the WiFi issue. Unlike the Nighthawk, management of the features are a bit counter-intuitive and the Help available from the main configuration page is singularly lacking in actual Help. Repeatedly it tells me to use the App, but the App seems to have less functionality than the browser based page. Most of what I've found has been by searching Google for a relevant string, whereupon a Help Topic from EE magically appears online.
-- Terry Coles -- Next meeting: Online, Jitsi, Tuesday, 2025-08-05 20:00 Check to whom you are replying Meetings, mailing list, IRC, ... https://dorset.lug.org.uk New thread, don't hijack: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk
