The End of Analogue Phone Lines

Steve

That is certainly the case but I suspect the infrastructure for the current phones is getting old and with the advent of Fibre I don't suppose BT want to maintain or replace it. The evidence is that fewer and fewer people are relying on landlines anyway. I suppose it depends on how reliable they can keep the internet system?

David

Which is why when most of our phones were connected through the internet we had one that wasn't and was not cordless. If the net went down or we had a power cut we still had that one.

It looks the new system will have to provide some sort of emergency back up for at least an hour.

Duplicate post removed.

Doubt that it will unless you provide it yourself. 

The other thing I wonder about is what they are going to put up to cover for the lost revenue. If I use VOIP I can make calls all over the world for next to nothing, other than I need access to the internet. However, if I was to use my land line it would cost an arm and a leg.😂

BT?🙄, BT are great until things go wrong then they’re a pain to get in for a fix☹️. I left them due to me being off line over a week whilst openreach kept letting me down. I hope independent suppliers will have engineers & not a monopoly for BT/OR. There’s a good reason why BT-openreach are never classed as good+.

That’s probably because they are pushing  HALO. On that if our internet goes down they switch my mobile to unlimited 4G and send a mobile router to use until sorted. I wasn’t really bothered but they gave it to me for the same price as what we were paying, if we signed for another 18 months. 

Over the past few months, our little seaside town has gone through the massive disruption of having fibre cable brought to everyone's house (or just outside) - indeed it's still going on.  When I enquired with our ISP, I was told I could have super-fast broadband for less money than I'm paying now.  The downside was, that we would loose our landline.

Coincidentally, talking to an Openreach engineer, working in our road, he told me that, so far, the take-up had been virtually zero because most people didn't want to loose their landline.  

Although we both have unlimited minutes on our mobiles - as with the landline - I am reluctant to loose the landline, despite the fact we don't really need it.  It's probably going to take a few more years before not having a landline becomes 'acceptable'.

Our daughter in NZ has her landline via the Internet. They turn their Internet off overnight, always have, and only turn on when they require it. We only learned this when trying to ring their landline getting no reply but knowing there should be someone there. The phone appeared to ring so that was no assistance to us! Apparently the landlines doesn't ring if Internet isn't connected but the caller doesn't get the equivalent of an engaged tone so has no idea why its not being picked up 😤

I don't know if this system will work in the same way - but seems a step backwards??

Our mobile signal indoors is unreliable so when renegotiating our cable contract we kept free anytime calls. As we have our preference number as the landline. Plus lots of folk we rarely talk too only have the address and phone number from when we moved in almost 36 years ago 🤣. 

We too have been inundated with the company works since 1st lockdown upgrading the street systems.