Landline being moved to fibre soon. Can I formally refuse this?

[hotlips69]

As per the title, my home phone setup is quite complicated with many extensions around my large house, all of which I wired myself many years ago.

The "main" Virgin socket is downstairs & all the extenstions are taken from this around the house.

The Virgin Hub5 (gigabit broadband) is upstairs in an awkward place miles away from the main downstairs socket & also nowhere near any of the extensions sockets, so it's massive hassle to connect this together, plus I'm very happy to stay on the current copper cables until the last minute when they are physically disconnected in the future.

My question is: Can I formally request NOT to move over, but without fear of being disconnected & losing my phone number (this is what someone in the foreign call centre god knows where told me when I called to ask this question)

[Martin_N]

Hi hotlips69,

Thank you for your post. 

With regards to your question. You wouldn't be able to stay on the old style of Landline service. 

We are moving all customers over to the new 21CV system. If a customer decided not to have this, then it would mean we would have to disconnect their Landline service. 

^Martin

[hotlips69]

Where I live, all the mobile networks are poor/non-existant...will this affect the overall quality of the landline calls after the fibre switch?

Can this new adapter that is being sent to me connect to one of my phone extension sockets as opposed to the "main" socket?

[Tudor]

1. Nothing to do with mobile network

2. Yes, you can connect to any socket. If and sockets are not near the hub you want request, for free, a technician to install a cable from the hub to a landline socket.

[hotlips69]

Can I simply use a long phone extension type cable to make the hub reach the nearest socket in a different room?

So when this is all connected, I presume all my phones & sockets will still see & talk to each other & be fully usuable as now?

[Martin_N]

We wouldn't affect any existing sockets. We would recommend all cables we provide. 

^Martin

[hotlips69]

@Martin_N

Your answer doesn't make sense or answer my question(s).

I'd simply be using a bog-standard phone extension cable of the sort that have been around for many years to enable the hub to connect to the landline socket.

[Martin_N]

You wouldn't need to use the phone socket as the handset would connect into the adapter that would connect into the hub. You no longer use the landline socket. The handset wouldn't work if you connected into the Landline socket. 

^Martin

[hotlips69]

Apologies for maybe not wording my previous reply accurately.
When I refer to the landline socket, I meant the nearest extension socket that one of the (many) extensions is interconnected to around the house.
I'm guessing that the "main/master socket" becomes irrelevant after the changeover & the rest of the extensions simply link together by virtue of all being on the same house "circuit" ?

[VMUser1812 · Accepted solution]

This ‘should’ work, and I only say ‘should’ because without knowing all the details of your wiring, it’s completely impossible to be 100% sure.

One thing that you will have to do though, if you are going down this route, is to locate the existing master socket and disconnect the wires which are feeding it from the VM Omnibox on the outside wall. Otherwise connecting any socket to the hub, will 'back-feed’ the signals out to the VM copper-wire system, and that’ll probably confuse things royally!