We had BT fibre installed a couple of months ago. Also told, old phones will not work, but we will give you 2 new ones. They gave us 2 'Essential' phones and these work fine, though your broadband hub needs to be on for them to work, so they will not work in a power cut. We tried plugging our Panasonic answer machine 'hub' (we have 4 cordless phones) into the green 'phone' socket on the back of the BT hub and they worked fine, apart from putting a 2 second burst of white noise on any message you leave on the Panasonic answer machine. So basically, try it out and see which you prefer.