Does your Father-in-Law have a VM TV service, or is it just landline only? The reason I ask is that, assuming that what you have been told by the VM rep is actually true (not 100% guaranteed), then his phone system has been switched from the legacy ‘phone plugged into a wall socket’, to the all new shiny, ‘phone is plugged into the back of the broadband hub’ type of connection. Now, as your FiL doesn’t have a VM broadband connection, then he won’t have a hub, so it’s all a bit academic!
Now before we castigate VM for doing this, did your FiL get a latter in the last couple of months, explaining that this would happen by xyz date, and to contact them to arrange for them to turn up and fit the required equipment? Quite possibly he didn’t, but we have to be fair and ask if he did, but didn’t understand it and ignored it - in which case we may have to give VM the benefit of the doubt here.
Anyhow, the reason I asked about the TV provision was that VM can and will connect up a ‘broadband’ hub for him. This hub won’t actually provide broadband service but is required to connect the phone up to. From VM’s perspective, the easiest option is to position the hub (and hence the phone) close to the where the TV service is - and this may not be convenient or desirable for your FiL. Otherwise we are talking about extra cables being run from outside and additional holes being drilled through the wall. I strongly suspect that this latter option is NOT going to be done late in the afternoon/evening on a Bank Holiday - and that assumes that the promised ‘engineer will be there within four hours’, does have any relationship to reality and not just a fob-off to get you off the phone!
