We are moving to CVO in September and renting a villa with telephone sockets but no telephones. Will UK specification phones and cordless phones work in Portugal or do I need to buy new ones?

Thanks for any information.
Jim

In my experience the answer is to buy new ones in Portugal. The sockets are different and adaptors that actually work cost more than a new phone.

Thanks, Ian. Do phones bought in Portugal come with English instructions? It would be fun trying to set up a cordless phone and answerphone in Portuguese only! I have some Portuguese but not enough yet to tackle manuals!
Jim

I brought my UK phones out with me and they worked fine. The phone line connection plug is different here and the UK plug will not fit the wall socket. People here will sell you an adaptor at what I think is an expensive price. You can get one much cheaper in the shops at UK airport departure lounges (about a fiver) or you can simply buy a cable at the local DIY supermarkets out here (about 1.5 euros) and plug one end into the phone-which is the same fitting as UK-and the other into the wall socket.

You cannot buy answer phones out here and the only answer service is the message service operated by PT. In my experience this is hit and miss and does not tell you on return home that there is a message waiting like the traditional answering machine phone. I am told that some answerphones may be too sensitive for the PT system but I my BT Diverse 5250 works perfectly as did its predecessor a BT Diverse 2000 series (I cant remember the exact number)

My UK phone/fax machine also works perfectly here.

Thanks so much, Steve, that's really helpful.

Anyone else had different experiences?

Jim

We can all of us only speak from our own experience - when we bought phones in Portugal we got them from Staples in Faro and they came with multilingual instruction books so techie language was not a problem.

I run my UK job about 60% of the time from my "home/office" and reliable telecoms are vital to me so we took no chances. The cheap adaptors available at airports etc seem to be unreliable to me (sometimes the phone doesn't actually ring) but if others find them to work then what can I say ? - Yer pays yer money and yer takes yer choice.

Another gamble like many things are here - but maybe thats part of the fun

we moved out from London to Lisbon 3 years ago with about half a dozen phones; we brought some adaptors with us and bought some more here. All the phones would work ok but only one would actually ring for some unknown reason, and that was a fax machine so we put that in the hall where we could hear it in every room. We have now just moved out to Cascais and we are not bothering with fixed phones at all (like a lot of people we know): we have a cable internet connection and mobiles………

…….televisions? now that’s another story!! Someone in England recommended we take TVs and connect to the aerial via a portuguese video player….it didn’t work for us…..

……I bought my laptop out here and couldn’t get an internet connection with the phoneline ……it took me a month or two to discover the problem or find a way around it…..I got Portugal telecom to disconnect their voicemail service……ha it worked!! (I think another option would have been to buy a portuguese modem)….

If you consult your phone handbook you will see that each phone has a REN value. If the total for the phones connected exceeds the REN value that the line will support the handsets will not ring but that is not the fault of the adapters and you would get the same effect if you substituted the local phone connection cords for the ones supplied with the English phones.

I have still not heard of anyone who has been able to buy a Portuguese phone with a built in answering machine function which is very much a plus point for bringing out a UK phone with this facility.

I was warned off Uk TVs but mine work perfectly with UK Sky boxes. I have wired the terrestial aerial through one of the boxes and get perefct reception on this as well. I do, however, use UK VCRs but I don't know whether this has an effect or not.

I use a Sapo broadband connection which costs 33.99 euros a month and once I had made sure that I had connected the ASDL filters to each of the phone sockets evreything has worked well. It is great to not to have to worry about the cost of usage and also be able to use the phone at the same time as the computer. I did have a problem before connection of the service because I used to have a phone meter and the impulse counter on my PT line messed up the ASDL. Once I got PT to disconnect the counter everything worked well. The main difficulty was getting somone to tell me why the ASDL test had failed