I am writing this post, because although there is much of this information in other posts, I found it very hard to find and collate the various posts.
You want to leave your phones plugged in where they are … you can. It is possible to re-enable the existing sockets with this CV21 upgrade.
You already have the wiring round the house which extends your old ‘BT’ type (old virgin media) phone line to the phone secondary sockets round the house where you have and want your phones plugged in.
What needs to be done is for the new Virgin Media CV21 connection to drive those phone sockets, instead of the old ‘BT’ type (old virgin media) line.
In the virgin media documentation you may see this called out as “This 'backfeeds' the new phone connection from the hub into the old extension sockets around the home to re-enable them.”
Details:
The master socket for the old telephone line has a faceplate which connects to the house sockets, and a backplate that has the old ‘BT’ type (old virgin media) line connected to it.
You can only drive the sockets around the house from either the new Virgin media CV21 connection from the modem, OR from the old line.
The steps that the Virgin Media engineer needs to do to achieve this are:
- take the Master socket off the wall and remove the old telephone line cable connected to the back plate (remove the old incoming ‘BT’ type (old virgin media) line) – this is not being used any longer.
- screw the master socket back to the wall
- using an RJ11 plug to ‘BT’ male plug cable / adaptor connect the telephone port on the Virgin Media modem to the faceplate (this will connect the modem telephone port to the extension sockets)
Note if the master socket is in the same room as the hub, great, plug it in there – but if not, once the old line has been removed from the Master socket, you can plug the telephone port of your Virgin Media modem into any telephone socket in the house.
Test that you can now make calls from your phones.
Note that the modem will have have to have been transitioned to CV21 operation
Before testing your phones around the house, or if they don’t work, plug a phone directly into the back of the modem to see if the fault is the connection to Virgin Media, or a connection problem within the house.
I hope this helps many of you out there.
We went through this with an engineer who visited my Mum.
Thank you very much to Ivan whose patience and willingness to work with us enabled to get this working, where 5 or so other engineers had previously failed.
Thanks too to Ivan’s manager who understood what was needed and supported Ivan in doing this work.
Just a quick caveat:
I have not done the investigations, but it is possible that the new CV21 link from the modem will not drive as many phones as the old ‘BT’ (old virgin media) line would have done, so if it doesn’t work first time, try unplugging all but one phone and then gradually plug others in – my Mum has 3 phones and an extension ringer plugged in and they ‘just worked’ as they should have done once Ivan had complete this change.
