News BT looks to shutter its plain old telephone service

BT are doing this with ISDN also. 99% of all calls at some point go over IP at the moment. SIP is the way to go. We only need that copper in the ground for data, which can handle the voice traffic.

BT's preferred method at the moment will be cloud hosted telephony with broadband connections to site dedicated to VoIP, failing that, on premises PBX with SIP trunks on their own broadband links.

If you think about it, all you need is G.729 down to a SIP device in your house connected to service provider. That's 24Kbps you need for that, although you'll need more in the real world. Most people cannot tell the difference between their blessed analogue lines and G.729. Fax machines can though...

 

Bet we'll still get stuck with Line Rental though.

 

Virgin are looking at doing the same thing with Voice Over Cable.

 

For sure. You're still going to need a way into the home, whether it is over the air, under or over the ground.

EDIT: although saying that, pay as you go is already a thing. If we're sending G.729 over the air & you are the mobile operator, as long as you make enough from those pre paid subsciptions, you would never need commit to anything other than 100MB at a time for voice. Even that is probably overkill. You are looking at maybe 7 hours of talk time there.

 

Having lived in a city that lost power for a over week, it was important to have the old redundant phone system. The relay towers lost power, and the only way to communicate was the old-fashioned corded phone.

 

Old fashioned corded phone? You mean the ones almost no one has any more?

 

and connects to a CO/Exchange that needs power.

 

I keep a cheap corded phone in my desk drawer for the exact reason Cheapskate just mentioned. I've had to use it far too often as well...

 

I find it's a good idea to have even a very cheap corded phone plugged into a splitter on the phone line and tucked away somewhere. The one I have was £3.

If it's not necessary I don't want to lose the ability to make and receive calls if I lose power, and I can imagine situations where it could be pretty important.

It rather depends how localised the cut is and where the CO/Exchange is. We had a few in the last couple of years and the phone has always still worked.

 

@Law99 - The old phone system supplies it's own power, and stayed connected when Houston's entire grid was destroyed.
To my knowledge, the providers are still balking at supplying backup power to relay towers.

 

I just think some solar powered mobile towers could take over. You can have battery back up for night. I think the amount of people with a tucked away corded phone is incredibly small and a newer alternative is worth moving to. Lets not hold on to expensive legacy tech if we could move to a newer cheaper alternative.

 

depends if its a genny or just battery (most only need to have backup power for 12 hours most seem to cover 24house or more, relay masts do not have backups)

 

Over here the average exchange only has half a day to a days worth of backup against power outages; which i beieve exiats so they can get generators in. An analogue phone gets voltage from the line correct, and will last loneger provided the exchange is online.

 

I've still got a black Bakelite model with dial (a 332 GPO for the geeks). I love the bell. And hey, how else is Tank going to give me an exit?

 

So are they going to supply fast broadband to 100% of the country or are remote rural areas going to be cut off completely because their broadband isn't fast enough for VoIP? The regulator must say no. Most homes have telephones, not all have broadband. A wired phone line is not disconnected due to low usage so is there for emergencies - which is more than can be said for mobiles! I am a shareholder in BT but not one of the greedy B's in the City of London. I feel the billions in profits a year are enough.

 

And BT are going to replace the phones for 10% of the population with compatible equipment to run the codecs and show them how to use the equipment? On Ofcom's figures for 2014, 23% of the population did not have broadband (either fixed or mobile) and 2.5 million residential telephone lines were not being used for broadband. When BT was privatised this provision was a core requirement of the privatisation. The ownership of all that copper was given to them purely to supply a telephone service. Just because they are making more profits from broadband and other services should not release their obligation to supply a fixed line telephone service. They do actually charge a line rental for it.

 

Stop being all butthurt. It's old legacy tech and we are in the future. BT will ask OFCOM and there will be a significant period of time before a lengthy transition period, akin to TV moving from analogue to digital. Buying a compatible phone or adaptor is just like buying a new TV or set top box, there were leaflets helplines and actual people that helped with that transition. It's not about dropping copper to save money, they always pass that charge on, its about fibre being supremely better.

 

I think you, and possibly most articles I've read, don't really 100% understand what is happening here, hell I'm not fully up to scratch and I work in telecomms. It doesn't have to be that you don't have an analogue phone, just that the network it runs on, after 2025, will no longer use TDM or Circuit Switched tech for transit at all. Your connection won't necessarily be SIP, but the exchange 100% will be; at the very least, you'll be plugged into an analogue gateway at the exchange. The BT network is mostly running on IP now anyway, you just don't realise. And you are grossly overestimating how much bandwidth and configuration is needed to run VoIP properly by mentioning broadband figures.

You certainly won't be able to buy a new ISDN service after 2020. Normal users just aren't going to be that affected.