BT agrees to pause plans to switch off traditional landlines in favour of Digital Voice for some UK customers
tinyurl.com/yow4qqe3
I live in an urban area ( Esher) and the mobile reception in house is very poor.
My smart phone when used indoors usually only connects via the Wi Fi
We live in a flat area and have a couple of masts within half a mile but I have no idea what networks use them but I think the nearest is EE.
I have a BT landline and a cable connection for Wi Fi.
I recent years I have had problems with EE and had to resort to calling the CEOs office to get action to fix their equipment.
It seems that BT will jump to using my Wi Fi router for my line transfer. Can they insist on this?
I would rather they used an alternative. Any idea if I can get this?
We do not have any telecare devices or personal alarms.
I have a couple of good sized lithium car jump starters that can be used as back up power supplies
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>>resort to calling the CEOs office
I've emailed CEOs a few times when I've hit a brick wall - effective!
>>It seems that BT will jump to using my Wi Fi router for my line transfer. Can they insist on >>this?
I think there's no alternative for your landline, if you want to retain your landline number. There is your mobile and I believe it's possible to have satellite comms.
The VOIP at my current property is vastly superior to the landline service at my previous house.
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Ned Lud here.
Presumably you need a landline for broadband ? I almost certainly haven’t used my home phone for several years…
Hate having to pay the provider for the line rental…
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You can now get a BB package on its own through most providers. Yes, you'll still need a phone line (unless the BB is fibre) but you can't make or receive calls.
eg
www.bt.com/broadband/broadband-without-landline
Last edited by: VxFan on Tue 19 Dec 23 at 11:09
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My BB supplier disconnected my landline wivout telling me. It wasn't until I phoned em to report a fault that I found out.
My con-tract with Onestream BB is ending in just over 3 weeks (thank gawd!) so I'll be a'moving on.
There be some useful info here, apart from the advice about extensions:
www.thinkbroadband.com/guides/digital-voice-pstn-switch-off-and-telephone-extensions?category=guides
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Well what a coincidence, we had a power cut this morning.
Reported as wide spread in our area.
Folks across the road not affected. Friends a few hundred yards away were.
I had to stand by the pavement in the street, in the rain, under a brolly to make a few calls alerting folks to our situation.
Neighbours on both side were not at home. (one is on another cable phase to us )
All very odd/unusual effects from the outage.
BT land line dead. I thought they had back up.
TV kept going.
One set of LED lights in one room kept going.
Many other things were partially affected.
12v ceiling lights in one room had a very low glow
Other light fittings with LED replacements would not start up.
Of course most things were switched off by the outage
I have the usual round of resetting clock displays etc.
Approx two hours before it was restored.
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I thought that the principal advantage of a traditional landline is that it carries low electrical current/voltage. This should mean that a landline is unaffected by a local power cut.
When we recently moved we ditched the charge for anytime calls and use smartphones, but the landline still delivers broadband. The phone still works - but we are now charged for it if used.
My understanding - which may be flawed:
- the cost of maintaining a landline infrastructure is huge given that it functionally duplicates part of the mobile network (there are apparently 85m smartphones registered in the UK)
- as comms moves to fibre (which does not conduct electricity) rather than copper the advantage of landlines (resilience in power outages disappears
There may be some arguments - security, data volumes etc - for retaining domestic landlines - but I think the days of wires and cables are coming to an end.
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The total opposite surely. The internet is totally dependant on wires and cables and VOIP will use that network.
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>> The total opposite surely. The internet is totally dependant on wires and cables and VOIP
>> will use that network.
Apparently most, but not all, telephone masts are connected to the network with fibre. The exceptions are mainly masts in more remote areas which retransmit using microwave dishes.
3G was launched in the UK in 2003 and probably marked the mass adoption of mobile phones - 4G is becoming history and 5G beckons.
Masts in urban areas would originally have been installed using fibre to the network. Later upgrades would largely use existing locations and connectivity - avoids planning issues, possible interference from adjacent buildings and other "noise".
It is possible that data capacity of fibre is dominant - but longer term I suspect the trend will be to eliminate the cost of digging trenches, cables and associated maintenance. A single home router may have a capacity for 250 devices - probably unthinkable a decade ago!
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>> The total opposite surely. The internet is totally dependant on wires and cables and VOIP
>> will use that network.
At what point is it totally dependent on wire/cable?
Certainly for many/most the 'last mile' from the exchange or street box is and that, I think, is where the next big change will be.
It's years since BT were advertising how they were upgrading the trunk network with microwave and optical cables. Very few, if any , cross country roads now have telephone wires along them. Still in lots of domestic streets though.
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Optical cable is still cable. The internet is a cabled network.
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>> Optical cable is still cable. The internet is a cabled network.
Well up to a point Lord Copper :-P
I suppose we do use the term 'fibre optic cable'.
I think most of us though are differentiating fibre optic from cable comprising metal wires.
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>> It's years since BT were advertising how they were upgrading the trunk network with microwave
>> and optical cables. Very few, if any , cross country roads now have telephone wires
>> along them. Still in lots of domestic streets though.
I think you'll find they're still there. An awful lot more info can be pushed down a fibre and there was a lot of 'blown fibre' put in existing u/g networks. I don't recall existing stuff being recovered.
There were recent stories about the value of copper under the streets owned by BT/open reach.
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>> I think you'll find they're still there.
Was mostly thinking about the 'telegraph' poles that once lined many cross country roads. I guess they went underground in a lot of places.
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Reflect on the thought that domestic internet speeds have increased from ~10kbps in 1993 to ~40mbps (my cheap package) today. An increase over the last 30 years of 40,000 times - I personally doubt the future will repeat this growth.
The volume of data has grown - we now routinely download film, music, social media etc. Some folk seem incapable of survival without hand, screen, eyes, brain interfaces in constant use.
Burying cables be they fibre or metal is yesterdays tech - it only exists because it was needed a few years ago. The limited reasons for using a hardwired broadband connection are (a) old habits die hard, and (b) I have some systems redundancy with a landline and smartphone.
New properties are being built without landline connectivity. Internet is being actively targeted by smartphone service providers. The outlook for domestic users is pretty clear. The only issue is the extent to which the whole network starts to adopt the rapidly changing technology.
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>Burying cables be they fibre or metal is yesterdays tech - it only exists because it was needed a few years ago.
Only if you ignore range, capacity, latency, speed, EMI and security.
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"New properties are being built without landline connectivity."
Indeed they are but all the ones of which I am aware have Optical Fibre broadband installed. It is part of Building Regs.
Last edited by: CGNorwich on Wed 20 Dec 23 at 19:44
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>> "New properties are being built without landline connectivity."
>>
>> Indeed they are but all the ones of which I am aware have Optical Fibre
>> broadband installed. It is part of Building Regs.
Don't they have to "support" it? I think that probably means installing a duct with a cable in it ready for a broadband provider to connect to.
Whether that is just copper, fibre, or both I don't know. We can't even get FTTP here.
My build pre-dated the introduction of this rule, whatever it is. I wanted it ducted. I would put the duct and cable in, to the foot of the pole immediately outside my gate. I contacted Openreach who said they would have to come and do a survey for which they would charge me £350 + VAT, following which they would give me a spec for the trench etc. I didn't bother, so it now arrives at the corner of the house under the eaves by aerial cable and descends to connect with the cable my electrician had put through the wall at the point of my choosing.
The annoying this is, the engineer who did it said that if I had just ducted a cable to the bottom of the pole regardless, he would have connected it anyway and glad to do it as he hated ladder work.
I had a similiar carry-on with the electricity which cost almost £2,000 to bring on to the plot from a pole 6 inches outside my boundary. I dug the cable trench. I didn't have a house at the time so I put in a big green cabinet on my side of the hedge where the meter is (you would not believe the minimum dimensions specified for this cabinet). It would have cost me £1200 to plus my own costs to move the meter to the house. I left it in the cabinet rather than moving it and knocking a hole in my lovely insulated wall for a meter cupboard.
Last edited by: Manatee on Wed 20 Dec 23 at 20:09
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Yes they have to be be broadband ready i.e have an optical cable connection to the house.
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>..following which they would give me a spec for the trench etc..
Our area was upgraded to FTTP about a year ago using the existing telephone ducts. The spec is '68mm gutter downpipe buried about a spade deep'.
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We have FTTP, and as our existing phone cable is underground I assume it would just be a case of pulling a fibre optic cable through when they get round to offering an upgrade?
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>> Our area was upgraded to FTTP about a year ago using the existing telephone ducts.
>> The spec is '68mm gutter downpipe buried about a spade deep'.
Exactly the same here. The fibre optic 'main' was run through the duct installed at build 25 years ago. When houses are connected they pull the stuff through to where the BT line currently enters the premises and connect up.
In the older parts of the village, including the main seventies build housing estate, the pavements/verges were dug and new ducting laid.
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It will be many years of course before we all get fibre to our houses. For most changeover to VOIP will simply mean plugging our phone into the router an continuing to use our copper connection.
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We went fibre with Virgin earlier this year and it all seems ok.
Apart from one problem. We have the base station and 2 extra handsets. The base, together with it's answerfone facility, is in the dining room, where the socket is.
The modem is upstairs in the landing cupboard.
The adaptor that they sent to plug the phone into the modem is 3 inches long ! Apart from having a cable across the landing, down the stairs and across the dining room....there seems to be no solution apart from having the base station upstairs and missing any answerfone callers . Anyone know of an answer machine which bleeps rather than depending on a little LED to alert you ?
Ted
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Here ya go Ted.
Tape the LDR sensor to the answerphone LED and connect a klaxon to the relay. The klaxon will sound everytime the LED blinks.
www.ebay.co.uk/itm/153096543279
;-)
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Where is the modem plugged into? Why is it in an upstairs cupboard?
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Ted
This is what I did to retain the internal wired network when they changed me over to VOIP.
www.car4play.com/redirect.php?https://tinyurl.com/yv6npwph
Last edited by: Fullchat on Fri 22 Dec 23 at 11:05
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Transfer of BT land line - bathtub tom
