Since my landline switched over and now plugs into my router, those calling me have mentioned that the ringtone now sounds like an international call with a long ring rather than the traditional British ‘ring ring’. Has anyone else experience this and how can it be changed back? When making external calls from landline, I hear the traditional ring ring, so would not have known anything was different.
thanks
Hi PaulSmith1,
Thank you for your post and welcome to our community forums. We're here to help.
It's a shame to hear that incoming calls are acting differently. Have you tried calling the number yourself from a different phone? Are you having any trouble making and/or receiving calls?
Thanks,
Hi, thanks for the reply. I have tried calling my landline from my mobile and experience the same strange ringtone. Calls connect ok when the landline is answered and I have no problem in making calls either. My only real concern is, that when anyone attempts to call my landline that they may mistaking think they have incorrectly dialled or worse, called an international number, as it sounds the same as calling somewhere like the USA.
Exactly the same issue, plugged the adapter in today..
Exactly the same issue, plugged into the router today..
It looks like others are having the same issue
https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Home-Phone/USA-Ringtone-amp-Call-Waiting-Issues/td-p/5366515
I've actually pleased to see it's not just me having the USA ring sound (4 second ring, then 2 second pause, then 4 second ring etc..) when people call you!
If I was calling someone & heard the USA ring sound, it would freak me out & think I'm ringing abroad which may cost me money & I may put the phone down.
Thank you all and we are so sorry again that this has been happening. We are currently looking into this with our teams and as soon as we have an update we will pop back to let you all know.
Thank you.
For reference, someone from Virgin rang me yesterday to try to see if factory resetting my Hub5 made any difference to my Call Waiting & American ring sound query.....it didn't!
Now waiting for someone from the higher network team to get in touch.....
Hi . I am having exactly the same issue with the foreign sounding ringtone. People are thinking they are ringing me abroad. Have been on the phone to virgin for an hour about this whilst they do their various tests and rebooting the modem. . They are now sending out an engineer.
I also notice that on call waiting, even though I hear the beeps, the caller does not hear that the old message " the caller knows you are waiting" so that they know they are on call waiting. It just keeps ringing for them.
Hiribboncontrolle, thanks for the message and welcome back to the forums.
I am sorry to hear that you are having issues with the ring tone and am happy to hear that an engineer is on the way.
Please let us know how the visit goes and if you have any further issues? ^Chris.
@ribboncontrolle What is an engineer going to do at your property as I understand this is a network issue!
When is the engineer coming as I'm very interested in what they do as I've got very similar issues?
Hey hotlips69, thank you for reaching out and a tech will run some tests to see if there is any issues at all.
They will check a lot of things, I am sure ribboncontrolle will report back after the visit. Cheers
For someone who is yet to switch, reading these posts that have not been resolved after more than a month, is not encouraging, to say the least. My father has switched and, due to hearing problems, is reporting that the line quality is awful. In addition, the technician did not put the phone base where he needed it in the living room. He moved it to a bedroom upstairs in order to plug the phone in to the router. This meant his answerphone was upstairs. The technician plugged in a wired phone in the hallway so my father did not have a phone near his chair in the living room. He is 88 and has multiple health problems. I am 61 and have long-Covid. My husband and I have had 5 bereavements in 6 months. Having asked for a delay to our switchover, which was agreed, it was still going ahead as planned tomorrow. In the end, we managed to delay for two months today. We do not have a double electric socket where we need to plug in the router and our phone base. We will have to get an electrician in. Our Internet service does not work very well in the loft. Our router is on the middle floor. Our house is 100 years old and has thick walls. We have an extender in the hallway but still struggle with a good signal in the living room for both TV and browsing. We have been told we need a nest. We have two estates to sort out in Ireland and Wales. We live in England. We do not have time to sort this out in two months. I am going to investigate switching to BT. Surely, it cannot be any worse than Virgin Media. I have been a Telewest, then Virgin, landline customer for 30 years. We added on TV 23 years ago, then internet and mobile. The services just get worse and worse. I have little confidence that all the problems with VOIP, internet and our mobile signal in a city centre will be sorted out soon. If VOIP doesn't work, we can't always even use our mobiles. Sometimes, I have to go outside or up to the loft just to get a mobile signal. I wish they would retain the current system and bring back the original providers. The technology is just not ready. We had a much better signal with EE than O2 so I expect we will be switching to BT or another provider. To safeguard having a phone for emergencies, one of us will be with a different provider. Then, we might actually have one phone out of three that works. Who decided that dispensing with landlines was actually a good idea? We use the WhatsApp service to phone when we can but the signal is not reliable. These companies are struggling to survive with WiFi calling, and all the other streaming services. No wonder there are so many problems. But, not having a good internet and mobile signal really doesn't help. Our neighbour is going to help us iron out some of the problems. He's already hlped by recommending we switch to Smarty. As soon as he returns from holiday, he'll be helping us to sort out the wifi signal as well. Thank goodness we have a neighbour who can help. I pity those who are elderly, or not internet-savy, since Virgin did not help my disabled father at all. Neither did the manufacturer of his phone. First they told him it wouldn't work with VOIP, then they said it would. And, it does. Thank goodness he has a daughter. We have no children so no-one to help us.
Hi hbaxter, thanks for the message and sorry to hear about the issues which you have had with us.
All providers are changing to VOIP by 2025 as per Ofcom guidelines. We would always aim to put the hub and phone in the best possible location and cordless handsets with multiple base units can be put around the home. The phone signal will come from our fibre cables, do you have an engineer due tomorrow for the switchover?
The swapping of the emergency back up lines (EBUL) is part of an ongoing programme to improve our services for vulnerable customers, and to also future-proof our mobile network.
It allows Virgin Media to introduce the ability for EBUL device users to be able to make calls to friends, as well as family members, on top of the emergency services, should they need help if their fibre phone line stops working. ^Chris.
Yes, I am aware that this is an OFCOM requirement by 2025. The date today is 31st August 2023, ie two years in advance of 2025!! Despite being told yesterday that our switchover was being delayed by 2 months, this has gone ahead without us being informed. We only found out as my brother-in-law tried to call, concerning my mother-in-law's estate, and our landline just rings and rings. However, we can still dial out. My husband's Virigin mobile did not ring in the house but registered a miss call. My husband reported a fault and the staff member could not understand how we can dial out. Her system is showing that we were still scheduled for the switchover today. We have not yet connected the adaptor to the router. As you can imagine, we are incensed. We have twice spent so much time on trying to get the installation of VOIP postponed. The fault person is not in tomorrow but we have received a test email. She was going to enquire as to whether we can be switched back to copper for the foreseeable future. After such treatment when we have so much to bear at the moment is appalling treatment of vulnerable and disabled customer. When I have the energy, I will be complaining to OFCOM. No, we did not have an engineer booked because twice we have been promised a postponement. We already have a base with two cordless extensions. The base is on the ground floor and the router on the first. Should we move the base to the router, our answerphone base will be on the first floor. I have covid-induced asthma at the age of 61. We can not move the router to the hall, there is no router cable. The TV cable is in the lounge, and the signal from moving the router there will not reach the first floor nor the loft. We have no adaptor to connect both the TV and the router with one cable. Virgin have left us with a mess to sort out ourselves. Having had five bereavements in six months with two estates in two different countries to sort out, along with ongoing health issues for which I am only just receiving assistance after a year with long-Covid, this is a most appalling way to treat a so-called valued customer after 30 years loyal service. Where do we go from here?
Update to the group.
thank you to Martin for taking this as far as he could. I had an engineer visit and reaffirmed that there is not a problem with the equipment within our homes. He had not experienced the issue before but following a conversation with his manager, he was advised that this is a known problem in my local area and the wider county of Sussex. It is apparently being investigated but there was no incident ticket to reference and separately the issue had not been widely shared, either within the engineer community if the Virgin Media call centres either. This is not helpful got a few reasons. The first, it wastes everyone’s time as it’s always recorded as a new issue, secondly all of these independent reports are not being grouped together and as such, there is no recognition of a wider problem and last of all, the poor support staff and engineers are none the wiser and have to initiate a local d finer to investigate but they are not network people and are unable to resolve the real cause of the problem. Because of this. I can only hope that one day it will be fixed album nobody neems to in end problem z c there is no d dance that it is seen as a prime either. Just the occasional helpful person like Martin who takes the issue seriously and takes it as far as he can. Sadly that may not be enough! I would hope after testing this, someone senior at Virgin Medua will get in touch with me and bring some much needed confidence that what I have mentioned here is totally wrong, they have taken this seriously and flmeone is actively working on this network issue!
Paul, I too had an engineer out yesterday to replace my Hub5 at the insistance of the Virgin 2nd line support chap.
It made no difference to my American ring sound or call waiting issue as predicted.
Even the engineer knew it wouldn't fix anything when I explained the issues on his arrival, but he replaced it anyway so that he could then escalate the issue.....
I'm in Hove, Sussex & within the area you mentioned in your post, which is interesting.
Hi Hotlips! Good to hear that your engineer will be escalating the issue. I’m in Patcham, so not a million miles from you. I have also placed a note on our local community Facebook page. Most that have responded, also have the issue and. Some of those had not realised the problem affected them until I highlighted the issue!
hopefully the form team will pick up on these updates and register that there is a wider issue, link them and raise the priority. Let’s see…
This thread is really interesting... I'm quite surprised at the number of people who even noticed this, and even more that some people care about this. The ringback tone is provided by the terminating network (Virgin Media, in this case) and it not matching the traditional UK/BT ringback seems... almost beneficial? The BT ringback's short length doesn't sound like a typical "phone ring" - most other countries it's either longer or has a distinct ringing to it (the standard one in Australia is short like the UK but has an audible ring to it - possibly the most like an old fashioned phone ringing).
In the US some mobile networks once offered the choice to have hold music instead of a phone ring sound - for a price. I suspect the reason these services got discontinued is because few people receive enough calls to be willing to pay a fee for this.
Note, this is no criticism, if you prefer your callers to hear the sound of the BT ringback tone that's your preference. It's an aesthetic preference, and no one can objectively judge art. I just find it quite interesting how much attention this is getting for something I would have expected almost no one outside of a certain type of nerd (that I'm clearly included in!) to think about and especially to care about.
Hey allienet, thank you for posting this today are you having some issues with your ringback? Cheers
I’m having the same problem but what’s more annoying is I no longer get caller ID it just displays “withheld “. 😡
Hi, Ajb1975.
Thanks for taking the time to post here and sorry to see you're having similar issues with incoming calls, just to rule this out can we ask if you've tried calling your number in and check whether the number you call from is displayed on screen?
Does the same happen on all calls you receive, regardless?
Also, are you having any issues with the quality of the calls in or out apart from this different tone when receiving a call?
Hi.
Exactly same issue! I wonder if it's a regional gremlin? I'm in west midlands.
Sadly no further forward with this. I do wonder where the technical knowledge is? I think sending an engineer to me a while back, was just to placate me. They did suggest a wider issue within my area of Sussex that was being investigated but no reference number was forthcoming for the master ticket, for which I would have expected all other impacted customers issues to be recorded as child tickets. Don’t know, don’t care seems to be the barrier to get through. Virgin media please prove me wrong and let us know what is causing this and when we can expect a fix!
The same with me...nothing has changed whatsoever & I've still got the American ringtone & my call waiting is not working properly, but since the Virgin engineer came to me 6 weeks ago, I've not had any contact from Virgin 2nd line.
I'm losing patience with Virgin & this query.
So, I have the international dialing tone problem.
I have sought help and told it would be fixed within 48 hours after the relevant team contacted me.
I pushed again after a further 10 days and was told " It may not be a fault as people can get different ringback tones." that was from the network team.
I am told that is it, nothing more can be done.
I am just voicing my frustration and not expecting a response to this post but it has hit me hard, I was expecting a hospital appointment via my GP which never came. When I eventually contacted the surgery out of frustration they said they thought the number was wrong because of the ringtone. Others have said on this thread that it is only a ringtone and it doesnt matter, well it did for me.
This surely should be a simple problem for VM to fix.
