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jordanb 12 hours ago [-]
An interesting component of the switching off of POTS is that the quality of service requirements are different. POTS is regulated to require the phone company to maintain a certain legal quality of service with negative consequences for failing to do so.
Meanwhile, cell phone and VOIP services are "best effort."
The phone company put a pretty huge amount of effort into maintaining QoS (Lily Tomlin jokes aside) because there were consequences for not doing so. It makes sense that they would prefer to shed that responsibility.
ssl-3 6 hours ago [-]
The phone company was amazingly reliable, at least in the States.
In all of my decades I recall only one telephone outage one time, at home. A truck (or something) had snagged a line feeding the house. It was repaired less than an hour after reporting it.
And I'm nostalgic for that kind of reliability, but it's gone now.
I was chatting with a tech who was installing a new county 911 system a few weeks ago. There was a time, not so long ago, when 911 had been robust: Fixed circuits to multiple different areas (to walk around network issues). Slow, redundant, robust analog modems on leased lines for caller data and call control. Eventually, things like PRI or T1.
Either way, there were great racks of redundant gear at the 911 PSAP for managing calls.
But now? It's just VOIP over the public Internet. 911 calls get the same not-special class of service that posting this comment does. The huge gear-filled racks are gone. In their place is a router and a switch, and a collection of dispatch PCs.
(There's a backup IP connection, of course. This backup connection uses cellular data.)
catlifeonmars 3 hours ago [-]
I was going to point out VoLTE as an example of a system which runs over IP but still retains a lot of the concepts from circuit switched days. In theory (if you’re a network operator), you could expose dedicated bearer provisioning with QoS guarantees for applications to build on top of. I guess my point is that you can have tighter QoS control if you can get off the public internet and go through carrier IPX instead.
6510 4 hours ago [-]
Back in the days, every time I pealed open a bundle of those paper wrapped wires I had to stop and be amazed how amazingly reliable it was. EVERY TIME
This just doesn't look like something that will work wonderfully for 80+ years.
tyrabound 7 hours ago [-]
It’s really one of the biggest failures on all of our societies that there are not only clear QoS requirements but also clear and strictly enforced consequences, including for politicians and their lies and people having to pay for the things they support.
marcindulak 11 hours ago [-]
In some places in Europe, the home internet ADSL technology on the copper wires, the same as used for PSTN phones, delivers higher speed (realistically an order of a few Mbps, stable) compared to congested LTE/4G mobile networks (typical 1-3 Mbps). The mobile network providers don't guarantee minumim speeds in the contracts, and customers (typically older people) that move from ADSL to LTE/4G, are left with a degraded service without a possibility to object.
hdgvhicv 5 hours ago [-]
Copper dsl remains working just fine - my last place was copper on a cable through the air and was 30 down 8 up. Not bad on wiring installed in the 1960s
No phone signal of course.
userbinator 8 hours ago [-]
compared to congested LTE/4G mobile networks
...which will get even more congested as people continue to migrate to using a network designed for mobility for devices which don't even move.
Imagine thousands of devices, most of which never move, sharing one WiFi access point.
I don't think regulation is the answer, but maybe a "mobile networks are for mobility" awareness campaign might help fix this stupidity.
marcindulak 7 hours ago [-]
It's not that much about WiFi access point, it's about the provider infrastructure congestion (cell towers), and how they prioritize 4G/5G. They appear to prioritize 5G more, and they are happy to sell 5G to people who've just bought a poor speed 4G from them.
In some locations fiber connections are not available, the LTE/4G/5G is the only home internet connection that mobile companies offer. You don't know what speeds you get before you buy the specific provider service. Not many people will experiment with various providers or alternative technologies.
supertrope 6 hours ago [-]
US providers used to have cellular data caps on their mainstream plans to hold down usage and therefore their spending on capacity upgrades. At $10/GB people learn fast to limit their usage, far faster than any ad campaign. Providers now have more capacity and fixed wireless is their way of monetizing idle capacity. They don't allow fixed wireless sign ups in congested areas.
BenjiWiebe 4 hours ago [-]
Our POTS provider here (Kansas) seems to have given up recently.
Over the last 2 years we've had to call in to get repairs done many times, and I don't know if we ever did in the 20 years before that.
And in the last couple months, our phones regularly quit working completely and we have to call in and go through lots of troubleshooting steps before the tech comes out and fixes the line half a mile away for the 10th time, only for it to quit working in another week or three.
Namidairo 5 hours ago [-]
> An interesting component of the switching off of POTS is that the quality of service requirements are different. POTS is regulated to require the phone company to maintain a certain legal quality of service with negative consequences for failing to do so.
Yeah we've had a similar thing happen in Australia. Most VoIP services require you to either tick a box or verbally waive one's rights to said requirements in regards to reliability and fault rectification timelines.
However, there hasn't been too much of an issue with transition to VoIP here, apart from the unreliability of some services they're being run on, and keeping emergency contact details up to date. The latter resulting in fines for providers here and there.
Mostly, it's just pushed mobile/cell services to the forefront, along with reliability concerns during major outages. (There have been a couple major outages to cellular/mobile connectivity where access to emergency services have been lost)
Surveyed usage of landlines for calls at home is about 12% here, down from about 54% in 2017.[1]
“Best efforts” is a legal term. Its definition can vary from state to state, but it is not just, “oh we tried, sorry, lol” and it defines the highest standard of implementation in all jurisdictions.
dhosek 11 hours ago [-]
Best efforts sits at the top of the efforts hierarchy in contract law. It asks for more than “reasonable efforts,” which calls for sensible steps, and more than “commercially reasonable efforts,” which measures conduct against industry norms. A party bound by a best efforts clause is expected to exhaust available avenues, not just pursue the obvious ones.
The clause acknowledges that success depends on variables nobody fully controls: market conditions, regulatory approvals, third-party cooperation. So instead of promising a result, the party promises effort of a particular quality. Courts then evaluate that effort after the fact, which is where things get complicated.
"Best effort" is below rigorous QoS specifications though. Saying "99.999% of calls must complete" with a rigorous definition of completion is different than saying "best effort".
supertrope 7 hours ago [-]
The economic incentives are different. AT&T was the monopoly phone company subject to rate-of-return regulation. The more they spent on CAPEX the more they could raise prices. So naturally they spared no expense in maximizing the reliability (99.999% uptime) and quality of their network.
Then cellphones and the Internet happened (as much as they fought it). Why invest in a dying industry? Now phones are used to send picture messages and get addicted to watching one short form video after another.
People value mobility and having one phone bill over toll quality voice. People get much more annoyed at "All circuits are busy. Please try again later." errors or 5 cents per minute than mushy call quality. Making phone calls from a car or walking on the street is always going to be noisier than at home.
gumby 11 hours ago [-]
The biggest problems is power. The phone company power the POTS line — you can even make an emergency call from an abandoned building with no electrical service (and no phone subscription) if you find a jack and plug in. Under those huge central office buildings are huge banks of -48 V batteries which are required to provide a week of power (or was it two in the US? I can’t remember).
Now you’ll have a router with a battery that the owner doesn’t know about and won’t service, so that within a year or so it won’t work. In an emergency: no phone service.
Grombobulous 11 hours ago [-]
This assumes that anyone has maintained the 48V infrastructure, which doesn’t seem like something that will be feasible considering the insignificant quantity of customers using true copper landline service.
The other problem with customers preferring not to have landlines is that by the time they need them, it’s too late to convince them to buy a traditional telephone and plug it in. You are likely to be nursing home age if you still prefer having a landline. You can have amazing infrastructure but if nobody uses it, it’s useless.
What we really have now is cellular sites with their own infrastructure aiming to keep them operational during power outages.
Then we’ve also got various satellite services that are growing in capabilities day by day, and are built in to common devices like iPhones as an SOS method.
I’m not in the UK but my house was built relatively recently and it doesn’t have any telephone jacks. The theoretical benefits of a landline are entirely theoretical. The ship has thoroughly sailed.
gumby 10 hours ago [-]
You put the battery in the RC and have a battery maintenance schedule. They do that today: the CO battery is just for phones within a few miles of the CO, so rural setups use distributed batteries. Ppl forget how much of California is quite remote and (to my pleasure) without mobile coverage.
I have copper service (buried) for the alarm system in my house in Palo Alto, powered by the CO. I will be sorry to lose it.
The cell ppl so have batteries in the bis and ter nodes but not long term power like the phone company has to do.
Satellite bandwidth is quite limited and uses a lot of power. It’s not really a solution, especially with consumer terminals. It’s just a handwave to get away with not dealing with the problems.
Overall this is a step backwards on safety. Telecoms MAHA
mapontosevenths 10 hours ago [-]
My amateur radio friends used to sound paranoid when they talked about how it might be the last form of communication in an emergency. After all, I'd seen how overbuilt and reliable the PSTN was.
Now I wonder if maybe it's time to get licensed.
Rychard 10 hours ago [-]
In a true emergency, I don't know that it matters whether or not you're licensed.
I agree though that getting licensed might be useful for knowing how to use it.
ale42 6 hours ago [-]
> I agree though that getting licensed might be useful for knowing how to use it.
That's the whole point IMHO. You need practice to properly use a radio, especially during an emergency.
msla 7 hours ago [-]
In an emergency, either actual emergency services will be using all of the bands and amateurs will be well-advised to shut up, or the military (official or bandit) will be and, again, amateurs will be well-advised to not make themselves targets. Some people get the odd ideas that the Big Ones will be more like Northridge in 1994 than Cambodia in 1970.
Dylan16807 5 hours ago [-]
Why would emergency services fill up the amateur bands?
msla 5 hours ago [-]
Keeping everyone else quiet to remove the possibility of interference is just good sense. The Baofeng people alone would be a huge, unnecessary distraction.
toast0 7 hours ago [-]
> You put the battery in the RC and have a battery maintenance schedule. They do that today: the CO battery is just for phones within a few miles of the CO, so rural setups use distributed batteries.
I don't know for sure about POTS, because the pricing was prohibitive, but my local telco certainly did not use batteries at the remote terminal to keep ADSL online... when utility power dropped, ADSL dropped instantly, even when the outages were under 10 seconds.
My local wireless telcos provide about 4-8 hours of wireless after utility power drops. Not great, but better than what I got from ADSL + voip.
ssl-3 5 hours ago [-]
My neighborhood (along with most of the city) was without power for a couple of weeks following the 2012 derecho. I had VDSL at that time.
The VRADs scattered around the city included a battery that worked for as long as it worked. But I never did discover how long those batteries would last, because AT&T brought portable generators out to supply power to their VRADs.
I kept my end alive with the portable generator that I was using intermittently for everything else along with the backup battery that the modem came with.
The VDSL circuit never dropped during those two weeks -- and yes, I read the logs afterward with some astonishment. :)
(Since the RF environment was extremely quiet, wifi had fantastic range. I opened up an SSID for anyone within earshot to use and some folks actually did use it.)
---
Fast forward a dozen or so years. When the power dips in my neighborhood, the cable network drops out with it. So, sure: I've got a small UPS for my little stack of network gear, but fat lot of good that does when there's nobody for it to talk to.
And I've got ways to use LTE/5G as a backup, but the performance of the cell network also nosedives at that same time. It's not clear to me if that's due to a service interruption or instead due to everyone's pocket supercomputer switching from wifi to cellular data, but whatever the cause: It turns pretty useless.
(I'm on FTTH fiber now but it's only been a week. We'll see how it does the next time there's a power issue.)
lakeviewterrace 11 hours ago [-]
AT&T is using old people to market their new cellular-to-POTS bridge product.
The premise is she needs something as reliable as a landline, because during California wildfires the cell towers and power go down.
Maybe someone should have whispered to her that this product uses the same cell towers, or equally-vulnerable broadband. I could not stop laughing.
From the user guide[1], it appears to be a dual-WAN setup that uses both cellular and broadband. Not as good as decent POTS, but better than just cellular or broadband.
My understanding is it's wireless first, with failover to broadband. The broadband connection is optional.
They cannot manage the QoS over the broadband link.
My personal experience is any power outage lasting more than a few hours is also going to take out your community's broadband.
sidewndr46 8 hours ago [-]
This makes me think that the marketing at AT&T is outsourced to a group that has no idea how the service works.
10 hours ago [-]
post-it 11 hours ago [-]
> Now you’ll have a router with a battery that the owner doesn’t know about and won’t service
In Canada, Bell has actually discontinued battery backup in their latest modems, supposedly because they were having trouble with modems not rebooting correctly.
kotaKat 11 hours ago [-]
Verizon forces me if I want battery backup for my ONT to provide 12 D cell batteries.
There's some sense in which I prefer this, though, because at least I know how to source D batteries and they're a commonly available standard and I know exactly what their shelf life is. I might even have spares around in my emergency kit for things like lanterns and radios. I've also seen Verizon battery backup units that run on small lead-acid batteries which seem to need frequent replacing, and require me to look up the details and order from a specialty vendor every time... more annoying to keep extras of those on hand and tough luck if it reaches end of life shortly before or during an emergency.
Arainach 10 hours ago [-]
> Verizon battery backup units that run on small lead-acid batteries which seem to need frequent replacing, and require me to look up the details and order from a specialty vendor every time..
Have you? All of them I've encountered take a very standard 12V lead-acid battery - the same one that's inside consumer UPS units - and you can get replacements from a dozen brands on Amazon and other vendors.
I probably have to replace them every 2-3 years, though I imagine alkaline D-Cells would be far worse.
evanelias 9 hours ago [-]
In my experience, the bigger issue with Verizon's battery backups was that when the battery starts failing, the device beeps loudly every minute. That's especially problematic in apartments, as it tends to be within earshot of the bedroom. And the battery backup system is present in the ONT box even if you don't have phone service, or ever want it; and even if you own your home, it takes a lot of complaining to get Verizon to remove it. Horrendously stupid design.
toast0 7 hours ago [-]
> All of them I've encountered take a very standard 12V lead-acid battery - the same one that's inside consumer UPS units - and you can get replacements from a dozen brands on Amazon and other vendors.
There's about 70 different sizes for these standard 12V lead-acid batteries though. And most of my consumer UPS units hide the battery behind a security screw and don't list the battery size in the docs. If the battery was removed and not replaced, it's harder than it should be to find a new one.
Marsymars 7 hours ago [-]
You can get amazonbasics NiMH D-cell batteries for $24/4-pack.
Tricky bit is getting a good charger if you're getting them for a device that doesn't charge its own batteries.
Dylan16807 5 hours ago [-]
And ignore the bold text saying not to use rechargeables?
toomuchtodo 11 hours ago [-]
I think a solution to this is mandate providers provide a cellular interface for households for emergency response, with battery backup. Basically a mobile hotspot with a phone jack, speaker, microphone, and red button to call for help attached to a chonky batter pack. Device inventory and health is required to be reported to regulators.
This solves for power, and reporting means it’s trivial to log and audit if the devices are online and available for emergency service calls.
If a mobile tower isn’t available in the area, a tower must be made available for the sector coverage.
Anything else in a world of fiber to the home is compliance theater, as your example shows.
imthatsteve 7 hours ago [-]
That doesnt help when a natural disaster cuts power to an area for more than 24 hours. Cell towers dont have multi day battery capacity and with everyone calling their loved ones in the effected area they will be even more congested than normal. So even if they do have power your still likely to lose signal when the towers get ddosed by everyone trying to use them at the exact same time.
You see the same thing happen when theres a mass shooting and you get tons of people calling 911 and then you get a ton of people calling their loved ones to find out if theyre okay.
The cell towers also rely on an internet backbone so if you lose power long enough to lose internet then you lose cell towers even if they have all the power they need.
You could try putting all the communications infrastructure on a high priority circuit or something but unless your going to build out a hardened power grid parallel to the existing one, that would only cover you from load shedding not from natural disasters or even just power lines sagging on a hot day until they short circuit and blow the grid. So im not sure it would be worth the cost.
celtain 11 hours ago [-]
How many people still have a corded phone, and how many of those would remember that those phones still work when there's no power?
It's much more important to ensure that the cell network is resilient. Backup power, mobile towers that can be deployed to disaster areas, and continuing the rollout of satellite connectivity will help far more people than maintaining landline infrastructure.
danparsonson 5 hours ago [-]
My grandparents - and I imagine many people of their generation would assume that if their power failed, they could still pick up the phone and dial someone to get help, as they always could in the past. Not to mention that, at least in the case of my family, they may have a mobile phone but that doesn't necessarily mean they can remember how to use it.
userbinator 7 hours ago [-]
Not in the UK, but almost everyone I know has a landline in their house (although some may be VoIP). In a disaster scenario the cellular networks are going to be overloaded.
perching_aix 7 hours ago [-]
and landline won't? it's also oversubscribed. pretty sure it isn't guaranteed e2e circuit switched either, and that it hasn't been for quite a while.
userbinator 7 hours ago [-]
In case anyone was wondering, the -48V was chosen to reduce electrolytic corrosion and is the approximate voltage of a 24S lead acid battery. Later, PoE inherited this voltage standard.
ale42 6 hours ago [-]
The important part about corrosion protection is that the voltage is negative with respect to the ground. The absolute voltage is more for distance, and low enough to be safe. Nice read for those who are interested: https://pe2bz.philpem.me.uk/Comm/-%20Telephone/Info-901-Tele...
Polizeiposaune 6 hours ago [-]
No, the batteries typically do not last a week. More like ~8-ish hours. But there are typically also backup generators.
The impression I have is that the batteries are, in part, sized to give you a chance to fix the generator if it doesn't immediately start up.
esskay 11 hours ago [-]
You wont have a battery. In the UK they stopped providing a battery backup when they switched to the newer ONT quite a while ago, and routers typically do not include one either.
There are a few generic router battery backup products on the market but none specifically get advertised as working on the ONT, but many do. Realistically though they're utterly pointless when you can pick up a vastly superior APC UPS for the same price.
bdavbdav 9 hours ago [-]
My plan is to stick my UniFi gateway / switch on a UPS, and get one of those power over Ethernet injectors / barrel jack extractors(?) to power the OR ONT.
Chatting to the BT guy that last visited, they reckoned the street cab would only last for half a day or so without power.
ale42 6 hours ago [-]
> Now you’ll have a router with a battery
If you're lucky. Not sure if US or UK is enforcing batteries on routers to provide emergency services, but AFAIK in most of Europe there's nothing like that.
vardalab 7 hours ago [-]
my new 2.5 Gb fios ont eliminated the battery, when power goes it goes as well
criddell 6 hours ago [-]
Would plugging the ONT into a UPS work?
IshKebab 9 hours ago [-]
Err yeah except actually you'll just pull out your mobile phone and use that.
Somewhat rural here (well 1/4 mile from an A road). We were supposed to be switched to digital several times, been sent a pile of hubs and extender devices and have had several letters about the switchover date. Latest one was we are apparently "switched over" a month ago, except that it actually turns out to be SOTAP [1] and everything works exactly as before (including CLI, using the old 300 baud standard). I assume they couldn't get digital to us so they've installed kit at the exchange just so we are "switched over".
Fairly obviously, the SOTAP kit continues to provide power from the local exchange so even in the (relatively common) power cuts here the phones continue to work (we're not on any kind of priority register or anything like that, I assume it's just BT are dealing with peopole living out in the sticks).
N.B. we also have a 2nd line, on a business account (WFH) - that one is full digital, 70mbps VDSL and has cisco/yealink ATAs for phone service. So two lines, a home line that's SOTAP and a work line that's broadband/digital voice.
Replacing simple dedicated circuits with "best effort" highly complex packet-switched networks? I bet it's a great money-maker for those involved in the work, but a huge step backwards for reliability.
The move is part of a wider government scheme to get the UK onto all-digital high-speed networks running on fiber-optic infrastructure, and the legacy phone service – with its dependency on copper cabling – was standing in the way.
Not surprising that the government is involved; using new technology for new installations is acceptable, but cutting off existing paying customers with service that may have been working just fine for many decades is hostile.
I'm not in the UK, but my house has had a working landline since I bought it many decades ago, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Allybag 7 hours ago [-]
I'm sure there are still people that do use their landlines, but nobody I know does other than my grandparents, and I've never had a working landline in any flat I've lived in.
This isn't the government pushing people off a technology onto a cheaper, shittier alternative, society moved to a more convenient technology and the government don't want to waste money on a service used by a small and diminishing fraction of people.
danparsonson 5 hours ago [-]
That small and diminishing fraction are among the most vulnerable in society and therefore most likely to need a simple, reliable phone service that they understand how to use in an emergency.
6 hours ago [-]
brigandish 3 hours ago [-]
> nobody I know does other than my grandparents
Nice to see the younger generation caring so much about the elderly.
> the government don't want to waste money
The government exists to waste money, and if they want to start saving some I can think of 1000 better places to start.
Y_Y 12 hours ago [-]
> Anyone with concerns should contact their provider, but the responsibility cannot rest with customers alone.
Best of luck contacting your provider
Lio 10 hours ago [-]
"For a list of ways technology has failed to improved society... press #3"
That's not part of the phone system I want cut off. I want the part that allows international calls that come from the same few buildings in a small space that are responsible for half a trillion per year scams.
decryption 6 hours ago [-]
Australia hasn't had a POTS for a while now, since the National Broadband Network was "complete". They literally ripped the copper out of the ground and sold it for scrap, they even made specialised machines to make the task easier: https://www.rg.com.au/2022/09/29/telstra-mirait-take-deliver...
Hasn't really been much of an issue day-to-day. My mother for example still uses her landline phone on the same phone number she's had for decades via VOIP that the ISP operates. The vast majority of people use mobile phones as their primary voice service and it all seems to work just fine. But there has been a few notable outages (e.g: Telstra and their NTP mess, Optus and their emergency-call routing issues), and of course there's fringe issues with coverage gaps, but overall I'd say the mobile voice network is as reliable as the old POTS was (which was far from perfect).
anenefan 4 hours ago [-]
Still copper up my way mate - Even though the pair gain technology improved things for a time, golden days would be 1990s here, the service rendered got worse and worse. Present times it's not surprising to see a simple phone only landline down for months. For example my Dad's line - Telstra can fix the landline and it'll be dead again within a couple of weeks ... if only reporting took a couple of minutes but Telstra has ensured it takes up a couple of hours for each instance by phone, even using the chat bot path, the last time a year ago it still took a couple of hours based on the repeated sessions to finally get a technician to arrive, confirm and head back down the track to bodge the line and get the service up ... it lasted almost a month ... a sibling got him a mobile phone (given location somewhat limited) in the end.
decryption 3 hours ago [-]
You're telling me your Dad has (or had - he got a mobile now) a home, in Australia that lets you plug a phone into the wall and make/receives phone calls, without an internet service, in 2026??
I know there's copper for FTTN internet - but not phone calls?
anenefan 27 minutes ago [-]
Still exists purely as a copper line - 16 km plus - I've forgotten the actually distance to the exchange, I used to know all the figures, balancers etc on the line having chatted many times with various line repairers over the last 30 years.
The area I'm around still has plenty of copper that can't even run asdl. If people are lucky they have a mobile tower in sight with good signal or spend their own money to erect a small tower with external antenna / amplifier. One of the issues way back when NBN was first implemented, telcos were much more focused on just moving everyone to mobile services, while they improved their own mobile networks as much as they needed to offer a bare minimum - they had the ears of some in the government.
I hope at some point most people have NBN fibre arriving close enough if not fibre, a node with the copper in ground to be able to run faster speeds than asdl2+ ... I say that in an odd way only for the fact I knew of one region that had good asdl2+ speeds ... one of the later iterations of NBN (brought copper back into the equation along with the not fit for purpose butterfly connectors which soon corrode in use) ... a cheat to look good with roll out it was decided to convert those quite capable asdl2+ copper lines to NBN ... the outcome was the speed delivered was slower ... much slower - dial up speed while paying through the nose. I'm not sure if those poor folks ever got real NBN later on.
Dial up was killed off some years ago, so yes, just phone.
SillyUsername 3 hours ago [-]
Somebody please remind the ISPs that they are now an essential service.
Around 2am to 4am about twice a month my phone line and internet are down for randomly timed maintenance.
Britland is apparently an informal term for England/Britain.
So all of it.
oh it is el Reg, cheeky bastards
incompatible 3 hours ago [-]
Cheeky at the expense of people knowing what they are talking about.
tejtm 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed, I thought Britland might be a small district near the Midsomer cemetery.
lambdaone 5 hours ago [-]
There are a couple of quirky services that have been introduced as part of this. One is SOGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access), effectively FTTC internet access without the baseband POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) facility, so that you still connect via copper but now need a router at home to connect your POTS phone.[0] There is also SOTAP, which is the same but for ADSL.
The other is the even weirder SOTAP for Analogue[1], where they put what is effectively a router at the exchange for you; so it delivers old-fashioned POTS without the capability to have any digital service on the line. Like a mini-DSLAM without data.
> … public awareness seems low that analog phone services will soon be disconnected.
What’s the level of public awareness that they’re even using the landline service? My 98yo grandmother has had the “same” phone service (with the same phone number) for decades. She’s completely unaware of the infrastructure it runs on.
I happen to know that her area was converted to all fiber digital years ago, but she wouldn’t know that. Her children (my parents’ generation) are also clueless about the infrastructure itself.
So how many people know they’ll be affected even if they have been informed of the change?
stephbook 10 hours ago [-]
> need to coordinate a much more cohesive campaign that reaches customers directly
I think this is the crux. You should definitely mail everyone affected.
Send a letter 2 years before. 1 year before. 1 month before. Do a scream test at termination date (switch off for a day and see who pipes up), keep operating for two weeks and that's it.
Some people will never switch as long as "it works", but that's not your problem. Some letters, a website that the young generation can easily share (a daughter visits and a son takes care of IT, not uncommon.)
mhh__ 4 hours ago [-]
I do worry about communications in disasters and so on but I think the plan was always to cut the phone lines in that case anyway
tim333 4 hours ago [-]
In my flat in central London (W1) I've only got the old school copper wire into the flat. I've been hoping they'll install something else as the broadband over it is quite bad. Fingers crossed it doesn't all go wrong in Jan.
(update - googling seems they just turn off the phone service but keep the data on the same copper wires)
implements 11 hours ago [-]
[Tip] If you decide to cut the cord but want to keep your number you can port it to Andrews & Arnold (a small ISP, based in Bracknell) as a £1.80 per month VOIP subscription.
julianlam 10 hours ago [-]
Most voip providers should be able to do this, like voip.ms
kevTheDev 12 hours ago [-]
Where is Britland?
KaiserPro 12 hours ago [-]
UK, but its the register, who's headline comes from a long tradition of taking the piss out of/mirroring the use of, puns from uk tabloids.
grandfunction 11 hours ago [-]
I did like "no extensions"
ButlerianJihad 10 hours ago [-]
Quite the ringing endorsement. They’ve dialled-in the jargon whilst the Beeb insists on parroting the party line. It’s a real hang-up for some of us.
mapontosevenths 10 hours ago [-]
You deserve a Tip for that one! You're one smooth Operator!
cpncrunch 10 hours ago [-]
Never seen that word ever in my life. Bizarre to use such a ridiculously unknown word for such an important story. I was thinking where the fuck is britland? Must be somewhere in Scandinavia or Germany.
I mean, boffin: fine. Everyone in the UK knows what that means. But britland isn't a term that anyone in the UK has heard of. (Testing...)
ninalanyon 9 hours ago [-]
A word that has never been seen before isn't necessarily hard to understand. I'm pretty sure that any Brit would catch the meaning without thinking.
So pretty much anyone for whom the news is relevant would understand the headline immediately.
graemep 9 hours ago [-]
It was obvious to me. The article uses "Britain" and "UK"
cpncrunch 9 hours ago [-]
But the point is that I'm not going to read the article unless I know it's interesting or relevant. I assume Britland was some island or area. It sounds like a real name of an area. The only reason I clicked was because I wanted to find out where it was. I googled it and nothing came up, so I thought "I bet it just some fucked up register headline", and I was correct.
iamnothere 8 hours ago [-]
> The only reason I clicked was because I wanted to find out where it was.
It sounds like it was a successful title. Click obtained.
8 hours ago [-]
conorcleary 9 hours ago [-]
I figured it's anywhere they squack is theirs or was theirs ;-)
conorcleary 5 hours ago [-]
Squawk*
msla 7 hours ago [-]
I've also heard it called Ukogbanistan. (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland -stan)
I bet that makes the BNP/UKIP/Blackshirts/Reform/Tories suitably angry.
tialaramex 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe not for the Tories, depending on what stripe of Tory. Formally the Tories are the "Conservative and Unionist Party" because notionally one of the key things they stand for is that very specific United Kingdom including Northern Ireland. They are, at least in principle, a proudly Unionist party, which is why so many of the Irish Unionists† were disappointed about Tory Brexit policies.
And I imagine the Blackshirts, or whatever we're calling this current version of Nazi morons would think you meant it to suggest, as they believe, that "their" country has been overrun by foreigners.
† In Ireland a Unionist wants Ireland, at least part of it and in many cases all of it, to be "united" with Great Britain. Contrariwise Nationalists want all of Ireland to be a single uh, independent nation. These groupings correlate to varying degrees with which flavour of Christianity (if any) you practice, and with whether you want a Republic or Royalty. The trivial stereotypes would be a Protestant who wants the King of England to also rule the entire island of Ireland, and a Catholic who believes the entire island should be an independent Republic. One thing almost everybody appears to have agreed on is that murdering each other wasn't solving anything. So that's good.
elAhmo 6 hours ago [-]
I had to google what is Britland. First time in my life seeing this term used.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
FYI, it’s a synonym for Great Britain, as in the island.
gnabgib 6 hours ago [-]
No it's not, this is just the Register being the Register. Britain would have worked just fine.
wyclif 3 hours ago [-]
It's similar to how "Yookay" is now a word that has certain overtones that aren't conveyed by writing "UK" which is fewer letters.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
Britain is ambiguous. Great Britain is geographically specific. Britland is shorter.
gnabgib 3 hours ago [-]
Britain is specific, as is Great Britain (you can check.. they're synonyms). Britland is a longer word than Britain, and not used.. unless you count the Urban Dictionary etc.
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
The Hebrides are arguably British. They are not part of Great Britain.
gnabgib 3 hours ago [-]
The sources are about the United Kingdom[0], which isn't Great Britain either.. the slang Britland doesn't distinguish between any of the above, other than sounding derogatory.
What do you mean it's not. What else would you categorize it as?
xacky 12 hours ago [-]
It's still using the same cables if you're not using fttp. Just that the phone is connected through the router first.
LorenPechtel 10 hours ago [-]
The question is reliability.
nijave 4 hours ago [-]
Apparently controversial but POTS should die. Cell is reliable, has better voice quality, and is cheaper.
As an added bonus, it also works when you're not at home.
I think I can count on one hand the times cell service has been down for me in the last 20 years.
wolfi1 11 hours ago [-]
most landlines in continental Europe are already VoIP
11 hours ago [-]
jauntywundrkind 9 hours ago [-]
Lots of change in a short time.
Long-wave and Radio Teleswitch just shut down in the spring. After medium wave shut downs in 2024. Different topic but lots of communication changes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch
mmooss 10 hours ago [-]
> The company previously told The Register that customers without a fiber connection will likely be switched to SOTAP for Analog (Single Order Transitional Access Product), where equipment is installed in the local telephone exchange to allow them to continue to use their old phone line as before.
What does Single Order refer to? One purchase order at a time?
zh3 9 hours ago [-]
We're on SOTAP - nothing changes, except you have to dial the area code for local numbers. Analogue phones, CLI etc are unaffected. Basically it's an exchange end change, they put the kit needed to use analogue phones at the exchange instead of inside your residence.
azalemeth 8 hours ago [-]
Can you get SOTAP and VDSL (FFTC) on the same line?
My (pensioner) mother lives in a very rural area and Andrews and Arnolds is "her" ISP (which I pay for). The main issue is that a) no mobile network works indoors; and b) uptime is crap -- there were two months of 70% uptime in the last year and during both of them PSTN worked brilliantly when DSL didn't.
The main thing I'm worried about is 999 calls. She doesn't have mobile reception and PSTN is far, far more robust. She does get a lot of power cuts but that's not as common as degradation to the 10 km line from the "cabinet" by livestock or trees...
zh3 7 hours ago [-]
As I understand it, no. Previously analogue phone service and VDSL worked perfectly fine over the copper pair, however the changeover means a SOTAP line is analogue only and no longer supports VDSL.
A SOTAP line should work through a local power cut (reminder: check ours next time), it is a "transitional product" though for longer timescales it'll have to be something else (SPOT as a satellite service springs to mind, but as a cost).
Meanwhile, cell phone and VOIP services are "best effort."
The phone company put a pretty huge amount of effort into maintaining QoS (Lily Tomlin jokes aside) because there were consequences for not doing so. It makes sense that they would prefer to shed that responsibility.
In all of my decades I recall only one telephone outage one time, at home. A truck (or something) had snagged a line feeding the house. It was repaired less than an hour after reporting it.
And I'm nostalgic for that kind of reliability, but it's gone now.
I was chatting with a tech who was installing a new county 911 system a few weeks ago. There was a time, not so long ago, when 911 had been robust: Fixed circuits to multiple different areas (to walk around network issues). Slow, redundant, robust analog modems on leased lines for caller data and call control. Eventually, things like PRI or T1.
Either way, there were great racks of redundant gear at the 911 PSAP for managing calls.
But now? It's just VOIP over the public Internet. 911 calls get the same not-special class of service that posting this comment does. The huge gear-filled racks are gone. In their place is a router and a switch, and a collection of dispatch PCs.
(There's a backup IP connection, of course. This backup connection uses cellular data.)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/telecomarchaeology/posts/354...
This just doesn't look like something that will work wonderfully for 80+ years.
No phone signal of course.
...which will get even more congested as people continue to migrate to using a network designed for mobility for devices which don't even move.
Imagine thousands of devices, most of which never move, sharing one WiFi access point.
I don't think regulation is the answer, but maybe a "mobile networks are for mobility" awareness campaign might help fix this stupidity.
In some locations fiber connections are not available, the LTE/4G/5G is the only home internet connection that mobile companies offer. You don't know what speeds you get before you buy the specific provider service. Not many people will experiment with various providers or alternative technologies.
Over the last 2 years we've had to call in to get repairs done many times, and I don't know if we ever did in the 20 years before that.
And in the last couple months, our phones regularly quit working completely and we have to call in and go through lots of troubleshooting steps before the tech comes out and fixes the line half a mile away for the 10th time, only for it to quit working in another week or three.
Yeah we've had a similar thing happen in Australia. Most VoIP services require you to either tick a box or verbally waive one's rights to said requirements in regards to reliability and fault rectification timelines.
However, there hasn't been too much of an issue with transition to VoIP here, apart from the unreliability of some services they're being run on, and keeping emergency contact details up to date. The latter resulting in fines for providers here and there.
Mostly, it's just pushed mobile/cell services to the forefront, along with reliability concerns during major outages. (There have been a couple major outages to cellular/mobile connectivity where access to emergency services have been lost)
Surveyed usage of landlines for calls at home is about 12% here, down from about 54% in 2017.[1]
[1] https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2026-02/report/communic...
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/internet-and-p...
The clause acknowledges that success depends on variables nobody fully controls: market conditions, regulatory approvals, third-party cooperation. So instead of promising a result, the party promises effort of a particular quality. Courts then evaluate that effort after the fact, which is where things get complicated.
From https://fedlaws.org/best-efforts-standard-in-contracts-ucc-r...
Then cellphones and the Internet happened (as much as they fought it). Why invest in a dying industry? Now phones are used to send picture messages and get addicted to watching one short form video after another.
People value mobility and having one phone bill over toll quality voice. People get much more annoyed at "All circuits are busy. Please try again later." errors or 5 cents per minute than mushy call quality. Making phone calls from a car or walking on the street is always going to be noisier than at home.
Now you’ll have a router with a battery that the owner doesn’t know about and won’t service, so that within a year or so it won’t work. In an emergency: no phone service.
The other problem with customers preferring not to have landlines is that by the time they need them, it’s too late to convince them to buy a traditional telephone and plug it in. You are likely to be nursing home age if you still prefer having a landline. You can have amazing infrastructure but if nobody uses it, it’s useless.
What we really have now is cellular sites with their own infrastructure aiming to keep them operational during power outages.
Then we’ve also got various satellite services that are growing in capabilities day by day, and are built in to common devices like iPhones as an SOS method.
I’m not in the UK but my house was built relatively recently and it doesn’t have any telephone jacks. The theoretical benefits of a landline are entirely theoretical. The ship has thoroughly sailed.
I have copper service (buried) for the alarm system in my house in Palo Alto, powered by the CO. I will be sorry to lose it.
The cell ppl so have batteries in the bis and ter nodes but not long term power like the phone company has to do.
Satellite bandwidth is quite limited and uses a lot of power. It’s not really a solution, especially with consumer terminals. It’s just a handwave to get away with not dealing with the problems.
Overall this is a step backwards on safety. Telecoms MAHA
Now I wonder if maybe it's time to get licensed.
I agree though that getting licensed might be useful for knowing how to use it.
That's the whole point IMHO. You need practice to properly use a radio, especially during an emergency.
I don't know for sure about POTS, because the pricing was prohibitive, but my local telco certainly did not use batteries at the remote terminal to keep ADSL online... when utility power dropped, ADSL dropped instantly, even when the outages were under 10 seconds.
My local wireless telcos provide about 4-8 hours of wireless after utility power drops. Not great, but better than what I got from ADSL + voip.
The VRADs scattered around the city included a battery that worked for as long as it worked. But I never did discover how long those batteries would last, because AT&T brought portable generators out to supply power to their VRADs.
I kept my end alive with the portable generator that I was using intermittently for everything else along with the backup battery that the modem came with.
The VDSL circuit never dropped during those two weeks -- and yes, I read the logs afterward with some astonishment. :)
(Since the RF environment was extremely quiet, wifi had fantastic range. I opened up an SSID for anyone within earshot to use and some folks actually did use it.)
---
Fast forward a dozen or so years. When the power dips in my neighborhood, the cable network drops out with it. So, sure: I've got a small UPS for my little stack of network gear, but fat lot of good that does when there's nobody for it to talk to.
And I've got ways to use LTE/5G as a backup, but the performance of the cell network also nosedives at that same time. It's not clear to me if that's due to a service interruption or instead due to everyone's pocket supercomputer switching from wifi to cellular data, but whatever the cause: It turns pretty useless.
(I'm on FTTH fiber now but it's only been a week. We'll see how it does the next time there's a power issue.)
The premise is she needs something as reliable as a landline, because during California wildfires the cell towers and power go down.
Maybe someone should have whispered to her that this product uses the same cell towers, or equally-vulnerable broadband. I could not stop laughing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud2LaFDEUho
https://www.att.com/scmsassets/support/other/att-phone-advan...
They cannot manage the QoS over the broadband link.
My personal experience is any power outage lasting more than a few hours is also going to take out your community's broadband.
In Canada, Bell has actually discontinued battery backup in their latest modems, supposedly because they were having trouble with modems not rebooting correctly.
https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/battery-backup/p...
What a fuckin' joke.
Have you? All of them I've encountered take a very standard 12V lead-acid battery - the same one that's inside consumer UPS units - and you can get replacements from a dozen brands on Amazon and other vendors.
I probably have to replace them every 2-3 years, though I imagine alkaline D-Cells would be far worse.
There's about 70 different sizes for these standard 12V lead-acid batteries though. And most of my consumer UPS units hide the battery behind a security screw and don't list the battery size in the docs. If the battery was removed and not replaced, it's harder than it should be to find a new one.
Tricky bit is getting a good charger if you're getting them for a device that doesn't charge its own batteries.
This solves for power, and reporting means it’s trivial to log and audit if the devices are online and available for emergency service calls.
If a mobile tower isn’t available in the area, a tower must be made available for the sector coverage.
Anything else in a world of fiber to the home is compliance theater, as your example shows.
You see the same thing happen when theres a mass shooting and you get tons of people calling 911 and then you get a ton of people calling their loved ones to find out if theyre okay.
The cell towers also rely on an internet backbone so if you lose power long enough to lose internet then you lose cell towers even if they have all the power they need.
You could try putting all the communications infrastructure on a high priority circuit or something but unless your going to build out a hardened power grid parallel to the existing one, that would only cover you from load shedding not from natural disasters or even just power lines sagging on a hot day until they short circuit and blow the grid. So im not sure it would be worth the cost.
It's much more important to ensure that the cell network is resilient. Backup power, mobile towers that can be deployed to disaster areas, and continuing the rollout of satellite connectivity will help far more people than maintaining landline infrastructure.
The impression I have is that the batteries are, in part, sized to give you a chance to fix the generator if it doesn't immediately start up.
There are a few generic router battery backup products on the market but none specifically get advertised as working on the ONT, but many do. Realistically though they're utterly pointless when you can pick up a vastly superior APC UPS for the same price.
Chatting to the BT guy that last visited, they reckoned the street cab would only last for half a day or so without power.
If you're lucky. Not sure if US or UK is enforcing batteries on routers to provide emergency services, but AFAIK in most of Europe there's nothing like that.
Fairly obviously, the SOTAP kit continues to provide power from the local exchange so even in the (relatively common) power cuts here the phones continue to work (we're not on any kind of priority register or anything like that, I assume it's just BT are dealing with peopole living out in the sticks).
N.B. we also have a 2nd line, on a business account (WFH) - that one is full digital, 70mbps VDSL and has cisco/yealink ATAs for phone service. So two lines, a home line that's SOTAP and a work line that's broadband/digital voice.
[1] https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/09/openreach-laun...
The move is part of a wider government scheme to get the UK onto all-digital high-speed networks running on fiber-optic infrastructure, and the legacy phone service – with its dependency on copper cabling – was standing in the way.
Not surprising that the government is involved; using new technology for new installations is acceptable, but cutting off existing paying customers with service that may have been working just fine for many decades is hostile.
I'm not in the UK, but my house has had a working landline since I bought it many decades ago, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Nice to see the younger generation caring so much about the elderly.
> the government don't want to waste money
The government exists to waste money, and if they want to start saving some I can think of 1000 better places to start.
Best of luck contacting your provider
California's also been fighting this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/att-loses-key-ru...
Hasn't really been much of an issue day-to-day. My mother for example still uses her landline phone on the same phone number she's had for decades via VOIP that the ISP operates. The vast majority of people use mobile phones as their primary voice service and it all seems to work just fine. But there has been a few notable outages (e.g: Telstra and their NTP mess, Optus and their emergency-call routing issues), and of course there's fringe issues with coverage gaps, but overall I'd say the mobile voice network is as reliable as the old POTS was (which was far from perfect).
I know there's copper for FTTN internet - but not phone calls?
The area I'm around still has plenty of copper that can't even run asdl. If people are lucky they have a mobile tower in sight with good signal or spend their own money to erect a small tower with external antenna / amplifier. One of the issues way back when NBN was first implemented, telcos were much more focused on just moving everyone to mobile services, while they improved their own mobile networks as much as they needed to offer a bare minimum - they had the ears of some in the government.
I hope at some point most people have NBN fibre arriving close enough if not fibre, a node with the copper in ground to be able to run faster speeds than asdl2+ ... I say that in an odd way only for the fact I knew of one region that had good asdl2+ speeds ... one of the later iterations of NBN (brought copper back into the equation along with the not fit for purpose butterfly connectors which soon corrode in use) ... a cheat to look good with roll out it was decided to convert those quite capable asdl2+ copper lines to NBN ... the outcome was the speed delivered was slower ... much slower - dial up speed while paying through the nose. I'm not sure if those poor folks ever got real NBN later on.
Dial up was killed off some years ago, so yes, just phone.
Around 2am to 4am about twice a month my phone line and internet are down for randomly timed maintenance.
This is the peak time for people to die in their sleep https://deathspersecond.com/blog/how-many-people-die-in-thei...
So all of it.
oh it is el Reg, cheeky bastards
The other is the even weirder SOTAP for Analogue[1], where they put what is effectively a router at the exchange for you; so it delivers old-fashioned POTS without the capability to have any digital service on the line. Like a mini-DSLAM without data.
[0] https://www.openreach.com/content/dam/openreach/openreach-da... [1] https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/09/openreach-laun...
What’s the level of public awareness that they’re even using the landline service? My 98yo grandmother has had the “same” phone service (with the same phone number) for decades. She’s completely unaware of the infrastructure it runs on.
I happen to know that her area was converted to all fiber digital years ago, but she wouldn’t know that. Her children (my parents’ generation) are also clueless about the infrastructure itself.
So how many people know they’ll be affected even if they have been informed of the change?
I think this is the crux. You should definitely mail everyone affected.
Send a letter 2 years before. 1 year before. 1 month before. Do a scream test at termination date (switch off for a day and see who pipes up), keep operating for two weeks and that's it.
Some people will never switch as long as "it works", but that's not your problem. Some letters, a website that the young generation can easily share (a daughter visits and a son takes care of IT, not uncommon.)
(update - googling seems they just turn off the phone service but keep the data on the same copper wires)
I mean, boffin: fine. Everyone in the UK knows what that means. But britland isn't a term that anyone in the UK has heard of. (Testing...)
So pretty much anyone for whom the news is relevant would understand the headline immediately.
It sounds like it was a successful title. Click obtained.
I bet that makes the BNP/UKIP/Blackshirts/Reform/Tories suitably angry.
And I imagine the Blackshirts, or whatever we're calling this current version of Nazi morons would think you meant it to suggest, as they believe, that "their" country has been overrun by foreigners.
† In Ireland a Unionist wants Ireland, at least part of it and in many cases all of it, to be "united" with Great Britain. Contrariwise Nationalists want all of Ireland to be a single uh, independent nation. These groupings correlate to varying degrees with which flavour of Christianity (if any) you practice, and with whether you want a Republic or Royalty. The trivial stereotypes would be a Protestant who wants the King of England to also rule the entire island of Ireland, and a Catholic who believes the entire island should be an independent Republic. One thing almost everybody appears to have agreed on is that murdering each other wasn't solving anything. So that's good.
[0]: https://www.openreach.com/big-switch-off
As an added bonus, it also works when you're not at home.
I think I can count on one hand the times cell service has been down for me in the last 20 years.
Long-wave and Radio Teleswitch just shut down in the spring. After medium wave shut downs in 2024. Different topic but lots of communication changes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch
What does Single Order refer to? One purchase order at a time?
My (pensioner) mother lives in a very rural area and Andrews and Arnolds is "her" ISP (which I pay for). The main issue is that a) no mobile network works indoors; and b) uptime is crap -- there were two months of 70% uptime in the last year and during both of them PSTN worked brilliantly when DSL didn't.
The main thing I'm worried about is 999 calls. She doesn't have mobile reception and PSTN is far, far more robust. She does get a lot of power cuts but that's not as common as degradation to the 10 km line from the "cabinet" by livestock or trees...
A SOTAP line should work through a local power cut (reminder: check ours next time), it is a "transitional product" though for longer timescales it'll have to be something else (SPOT as a satellite service springs to mind, but as a cost).
https://www.findmespot.com/en-gb