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Aug 14, 2025 Last reply: 10 months ago 24 Replies

I am a Virginmedia customer (though it was called Telewest when I first changed to them. They have a different wiring scheme. I had one twisted pair wire to a telephone master socket and one coaxial cable which feeds my router via a lightning arrestor box. That arrangement was useful. If the phone stopped working I could report it across the internet, and if the internet failed I could phone up and report the fault. I rarely got a failure though.

A year or so ago, I was sent an adaptor which plugs into the "phone" socket and presents a standard BT socket to plug a phone into. On changeover day the router was remotely reloaded and the "phone" socket became live and I was asked to move the cable plugged into the telephone master socket into the adaptor in the router instead. When I did, the phone worked. I did plug a spare phone into the original telephone master socket and it still gave me a dialling tone for two more days then it died.

The good news is that the telephone calls are much cleaner, with no trace of a hiss or crackle, and slightly louder. The bad news is that if the router fails or there is a power cut then the broadband and the telephone both die. However, I took the precaution a couple of years ago to buy an inverter which gives me mains voltage from a car battery. The original intention was to power the central heating from a spare but serviceable 60Ah car battery kept on an intelligent trickle charger, so that in the middle of winter I would have a means of powering my gas boiler to prevent the house getting too cold. I could equally use that to power my router if I needed an emergency telephone call. So far, I have never lost the ability to phone.

The other slightly annoying feature is that the original telephone socket gave a pulsed rather than steady dialling tone if there was a voicemail to listen to. The router arrangement starts with a steady dialling tone and then starts pulsing it after a couple of seconds. If I am too quick starting the dialling I never find out if there are any voicemails waiting.

If you are in an area where power fails are likely, then I would insist on a battery arrangement for the router. I am in a reliable area and in reality I can't tell the difference between my original wired telephone and the VOIP replacement.

Nick, there's something really odd about that web site. I'd never heard of a .life tld, so there may be something odd about it...

The section "Bringing Broadband to Wennington" ends with "To reade a bit more... click _here_" where here is a link.

A dead link.

Which reads

formatting link

it's to a google address. And if I follow it through it's dead.

Please tell your friend / the village council.

Andy

Not really, it's just one of the new TLDs.

That link redirects me to:

formatting link
works.

I think the wennington.life site is hosted by Google and Google are doing their usual thing of spying on everything you do. So the links the Wennington people have put in to their website are being converted to Google tracking links, and are then redirected to the actual link target.

It's possible that Google have actually broken their spying redirect, and it only works because I'm running an adblocker. <shrug>, wouldn't be the first time.

...to move away from the Google spying machine, yes.

Theo

Only works insofar as successfully displaying a fancy 404 page.

If you can't see the content, try this.

formatting link
Paul

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