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This article is for anyone who has a BT landline and wants to get rid of it yet retain their landline number.
We had a BT landline and an EE wired router (i.e. broadband came via the landline). The EE broadband was costing us £29 a month (copper connection, not fibre) and the BT landline rental plus unlimited calls was £52 a month. Total £81 a month. We now pay £31 a month, with a call limit.
We were getting 6 Mbps on the EE router - we're quite a long way from the cabinet - and the internet connection was also often dropping: we suspected the wire from pole to house was deteriorating.
Our plan was to move to a 4G/5G router for internet, and to sign up with a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider and move our landline number to them from BT. This is a guide on how to do it.
In summary, it's easy when you know how:
But first, check how good the 4G/5G signal is at your house. Go for example to Three's website, put in your postcode and it'll tell you how good your signal is. If you can't get a decent signal from any provider read no further. If you live in the middle of nowhere Starlink will get you connected.
We are fortunate in having an excellent Three 4G signal at our house. Our local tower isn't yet 5G enabled but since we don't need high bandwidth that was not a problem. Anyway, 5G will be here before too long.
This is what to do having checked you can get a good 4G/5G signal.
Ring your current broadband provider and ask if you're in a contract period and what the termination charge would be if you discontinue the service. If the charge would be too much, maybe wait until near the end of the contract period. We'd had our EE service for years and were out of contract. Don't cancel your broadband service yet.
Sign up for Three (or your chosen supplier) 4G/5G broadband. Three's broadband costs £25 a month and the router comes free. Three were also offering half price (~£12) for the first 6 months which was a nice bonus. We signed up for a 24 month contract. With Three (and probably others) you get a 30 day cooling-off period: if the 4G/5G doesn't work well enough you can cancel and return the router - no charge.
The Three router arrived via DPD the next day. We plugged it in, waited three or four minutes for it to sort itself out, WiFied the laptops to it and it worked. Easy. The internet generally runs at about 22 Mbps which is fine for us.
To get your landline telephone number working via the internet you need to do two things: sign up with a VoIP provider, and buy a box that sits between your router and your phone. The box, an Analogue Telephone Adapter (ATA), translates digital internet stuff to good old fashioned analogue phone stuff.
We chose Voipfone and would recommend them. We made the mistake of buying the ATA (a Grandstream HT801 V2) from another company as it was a few quid cheaper. Mistake because if you buy the HT801 from Voipfone it comes already configured. Saves a lot of hassle finding out and putting in the settings* the HT801 needs to connect to Voipfone.
Note that the phone socket on the HT801 is RJ11 (squarish connector). If your phone has the flatter BT plug on the end of its wire you might need a BT to RJ11 adapter, around £4 from Voipfone or Amazon. However, if your phone base station has an RJ11 socket, a wire with an RJ11 male connector at both ends will do the trick. Your old wired router might well have just such a wire that you can reuse.
Sign up for the Voipfone 30 Day Free Trial and order the HT801 (it's about £54). Voipfone give you a temporary phone number: you can choose from a list of numbers which (in our case anyway) begin with your geographic dialling code. So if your actual landline number was, say, 01904 354627, you might get a temporary number of 01904 767601.
When the HT801 arrives, plug it into the Ethernet port on the Three router and plug your landline phone into the HT801. Test it by dialling 152 which is Voipfone's echo test: you say something and it's repeated back to you by the Voipfone system so you can see if there's any noticeable delay (latency).
Even if the phone works straight away (it might not) make the following changes to the HT801 settings. These will make the phone work reliably over 4G/5G.
Dial ***02 (three asterisks then 02) on the phone that's plugged into the HT801. You will hear the address of the HT801 - something like 192.168.0.119. Enter that in the address bar of your browser (e.g. Chrome). It'll then ask you for the userid and password both of which will be shown on the HT801's label. It's also possible to get into the HT801 by plugging its Ethernet cable into your laptop Ethernet socket (if it has one).
Once you're in the HT801, wander round to get an idea of what's where then make the following Settings changes. They probably aren't all absolutely necessary but make them all anyway:
After you change each setting and before leaving that page, click Apply otherwise the change won't be made.
Try 152 again. If there are problems log into your Voipfone account and click the online chat. If they're busy you might get the AI 'helper': try again a few minutes later and you'll get a human being. Voipfone customer support is UK-based and they are generally excellent - very helpful and patient. Explain the symptoms and they'll tell you what settings to change. Please let me know if anything should be added to the list above.
Once calls to 152 are OK, call your temporary Voipfone number from your mobile. Should work, but if not Voipfone will help. Then make a call to your mobile which should work just fine. Calls to 152 don't come out of your free 15 minutes so get calls to 152 working before ringing other numbers. Note that with VoIP, calls that don't connect - they ring but nobody answers - count as calls.
In our case the call quality via the HT801, 4G and Voipfone is just as good as our landline and the much talked about latency (i.e. delay) you can apparently experience with voice over internet phone calls isn't noticeable.
If you're happy with the way the phone works, go into your Voipfone account and sign up for the At Home 100 plan. It costs £6 a month and you get 100 call minutes per month (to landline or mobile numbers). There are other plans if you need more minutes than that. There's no contract period, you get billed monthly to your credit card and if you want to stop there's no termination fee.
By the way, not only do DECT phones (that have a base station and wireless handsets) work with the HT801, but old fashioned phones work too - even really old ones with rotary dials! (Probably long before your time...) Though phones that old will need a BT to RJ11 adapter otherwise they won't ring.
Now contact your old broadband provider and say you'd like to give 30 days notice of termination. When we rang EE we were surprised when they said they could cancel the service the very next day. And they did. Don't cancel your direct debit until after you've had the final bill from them.
Assuming the only service you now have with BT is your landline number (e.g. no home security alarms or medical pendants that might not work reliably over VoIP/4G) ditching BT is easier than you might expect. Again beware that if you're within a fixed term contract with BT you'll have early termination charges. If you ring BT to find out how much that will be, do not tell them you're going to cancel your landline: if you cancel the landline before your landline number is ported to Voipfone you'll lose your landline number.
All you have to do now is log into your Voipfone account, go to Porting in the Services tab, fill in your details and upload a recent BT phone bill. Voipfone then contact BT. We got an email from Voipfone the next day saying our porting request had been accepted and that it would happen in six days' time - and an email from BT saying 'sorry to see you go'. There's no charge for moving - porting - your number to Voipfone.
Voipfone will prompt you to set your emergency contact details, i.e. your address, so that if you ring 999 the Emergency Services will automatically know where you are. Note that during power cuts your router and therefore Voipfone won't work - you'd need a mobile to make emergency calls.
When the porting of your landline number to Voipfone is completed, BT will automatically send you a final bill. Don't cancel your BT direct debit until you've received that. BT sent an email on the day of porting saying they had ceased the Unlimited Minutes calling package, but didn't say the line rental had ended. Our BT account even seemed to suggest we had ordered a landline contract on that day. Very confusing. But Gemini says that's BT-speak for ordering a ceasing of the landline. Weird. Will see in a few days... If BT do only cancel your calling package you might need to contact them to end the line rental...
Go into your Voipfone account and delete the temporary number they gave you (otherwise you could end up being charged £3 a month for it).
The EE broadband was costing us £29 a month and BT, with unlimited calling minutes (which on reflection we didn't really need), was costing us £52 a month. For both, £81 a month. Now, Three is £25 a month and Voipfone is £6. For both, £31 a month.
There are other ways of doing it of course - you can port your landline number to your mobile for example. Some unlocked
4G/5G routers (e.g. the TP-Link NX510v) include a built-in phone port into which you can plug your landline phone directly,
and you configure your VoIP service on the router itself — no HT801 ATA required.
The article is how we did it.
One or two other things that might be useful:
If you didn't get your HT801 from Voipfone:
The phone was taking 2 seconds before it started ringing and then there was a 4 second gap between each pair of ring rings. These settings give the familiar BT ring sound and timings. You'll also get the familiar "it's ringing" sound when you call someone.
Having spent ages putting in the settings it's worth making a backup. Then if you need to do a factory reset, or get a new HT801, you can simply upload them.
Rename the downloaded file to HT801settingsbackup.xml or something like that
** No Key Entry Timeout. With an old fashioned phone as soon as you press a key, that digit goes out from the phone. To prevent the HT801 from thinking that's it and only dialling that one digit, it waits for 'No Key Entry Timeout' seconds before doing anything. After No Key Entry Timeout seconds (e.g. 4) the HT801 assumes you've finished and it dails out. But on a modern phone with a green 'go' button, nothing goes from the phone to the HT801 until you press go. So there's no need for the HT801 to wait for a few seconds in case more digits are coming.
Oh, and filters. If you had a wired router and had your phones plugged into BT sockets you'll have had filters. No longer needed.
It seems there are endless tweaks you can make to the HT801 settings and endless rabbit holes Gemini and Grok will take you down. Took a while to figure out the ringtone, but still can't figure out the # key. It's supposed to act like the green "dial now" button but I haven't succeeded in getting it to work despite Gemini's bright ideas.
Anyway, the phone works just fine, that's the main thing.
April 25th 2026
Copyright M Roberts 2026
mike@hraconsulting-ltd.co.uk