UKH

This was announced last year but I obviously missed it - https://telephone-europe.com/bt-switch-off/

I don't fully understand what will happen(and by 2025 seems very ambitious) but does this mean that every home and business in the UK will get FTTP by 2025? If so, I wonder if it means people who do not have(or want) a mobile will have to get FTTP even if they don't want it.

At present landline phones work if there a power cut. Does the FTTP equipment in a home/business need an electrical connection? If so, there could be a problem if there is a power cut and emergency services are needed.

My lack of knowledge/understanding of this could mean I the wrong end of the stick here.

Can anyone enlighten me?

Dave

Looks like they're "just" changing to VOIP rather than PSTN, so I don't see how that would mean FTTP for everyone.

See https://business.bt.com/insights/digital-transformation/uk-pstn-switch-off/

From a quick look the PSTN is referring mostly to their internal system management with the only real impact on users being the removal of ISDN which is mostly restricted to commercial use (or very serious home).

Are you sure? The link I found seems to imply otherwise. PSTN services are being retired for everyone and it'll involve changing all devices to IP equivalents (which sounds like a a pretty major change!) -

---

When you say ‘everyone…’?

Yes, we mean everyone. Business and home. And it’s not just your phone services you need to think about. It’s everything else that currently uses the old phone network, all your non-voice services connected to PSTN or ISDN lines. Things like alarms, EPOS machines, door entry systems, CCTV, and faxes.

---

When I saw the title I thought it was amazing news, although I was intrigued about what technology BT was going to use to turn off all landmines.

One of the Scandinavian countries did this a few years ago and resolved it by selling little boxes with SIM cards in them that had a traditional phone socket and looked to the device plugged into them like they were a landline phone line.  Not too hard to solve.

Many ADSL routers already have such a socket.

The "power cut" thing is a bit of a non issue as you don't get those often, and in any case who doesn't have a mobile now?

And fax machines - seriously, why?

Currently, the PSTN refers to landlines and the associated Marconi SystemX / Ericsson AXE / Nortel DMS -type exchange equipment that have supplied them since the mid 80's.  These all run circuit-based switching and link together using multiple E1 (2Mb / 30x 64kbps channel) bearers running on SDH transmission.  BT want to get rid of all that 'core' and replace it with IP-based tech interconnecting with Ethernet because it's cheaper and you can't buy circuit-based stuff anymore.  This was their fabled '21CN project' ('21st century network') which has dragged on interminably due to voice over IP not working very well for faxes and other dialup data services such as PDQ machines, telemetry and alarm systems.  They seem to have ironed out enough of those issues to proceed.

So, the link from the 'exchange' to your house needs to change from being 'analogue (or ISDN2) over copper from an exchange 'concentrator port''  to 'IP over copper' or 'IP over fibre' from an exchange or street MSAN node.  Because IP 'over anything' invariably requires a mains-powered device at the customer end it won't work in a powercut unless there's battery backup for the network terminating equipment.

Technically, it's possible to provide analogue and ISDN lines from an MSAN and do the core side using IP, but that requires specific cards in the MSAN and possibly dedicated line cards resulting in inefficiency and expense with converting plain analogue/ISDN lines to ones with broadband on them - they'd rather fill an MSAN with VDSL cards and use VoIP over broadband.

I don't know what BT's exact plan is. Jersey Telecom have gone down the 'full-fibre with battery backup for those that need it' route, but they like spending money unnecessarily because they're majority government-owned and like to say they're the best (like Texans).  Many people don't use their landlines anymore and have mobiles so the 'disaster proofness' of an exchange-powered analogue line isn't as critical as it used to be.  When all the PDQ machines/alarms/telemetry devices are native IP and faxes use T38 protocol then there's no problem to migrate those either.  we're currently rolling out domestic 'Fibre to the premises' here and you get a small mains-powered NTE that you can connect your existing internal wiring and broadband router to. It'll do everything the network currently does in terms of facilities apart from supporting decadic (pulse/click) dialling and earth calling, neither of which are used by many customers at all.  word on the street is that BT will still have some PSTN working beyond 2025 simply because it's a massive project. They're currently rationalising their existing exchange estate and amalgamating concentrator sites onto fewer processor sites.  Currently you have two core networks supplying your LL+BB service - the PSTN core and exchange concentrator doing the voice, and an IP core and MSAN doing the BB(data). This is very inefficient compared to using an IP core and MSAN to do both.  It does, however, increase the number of eggs in the basket, especially if it's also backhauling mobile base sites or running picocells.

Power cuts are less common now than say 20 years ago, but they do happen, eg when there is serious flooding or other severe weather, particular in rural areas where overhead power lines are not uncommon.

A device that plugs into a router could be a solution but there are plenty of people who do not have(or do not want) broadband access.

Similarly not everyone has or wants a mobile.

Dave

I don't understand everything in your post, Toerag but thanks for the explanation.

Dave

What don't you understand, I'll explain it

Mobile networks don't generally have the capacity for that number of pseudo-landlines - a base site can only handle a certain number of users logged onto it at any one time. Fine for rural areas, but no good in towns and cities. 5G will eliminate that restriction, it's one of the benefits of it.

Because faxes still constitute a 'written document' in legal terms. The finance industry still use them all the time - someone can rely on a fax to substantiate their instruction to do a multimillion pound deal in court. Faxes are the bane of my life, because fax call volumes are so low the carrier networks can't see any effects when looking at their graphs and thus don't know they've got a problem.  The problems with VoIP are also cumulative - customer will complain they can't fax Australia from here, yet they can fax London, London can fax Hong Kong, and Hong Kong can fax Oz - all the encoding/decoding/routing delays transiting networks add up to enough degradation of the signal that the faxes won't talk to each other over the whole chain, but every single link in it or combinations of links tests OK.

To be fair, if there are very serious problems like that the authorities know and can work around it.

I am not sure it is appropriate to maintain a large, expensive and outdated network just because of a few Luddites who can but won't simply spend £10 on a phone-only dumbphone with a 2 week battery life (or even pick up one for free from someone they know who's replaced theirs) and a PAYG SIM.

5G will be well rolled out by 2025, of course, at least in the urban areas where this would be a concern.  But surely we are in a position where most households have at least one mobile device per person already and these are already using the networks all the time?  I have 3 - phone, iPad and work phone.  So will this actually cause an issue given that you'd only need them for a tiny minority of households, as any household with a broadband router can just connect it to that or to a device going via wifi?

Perhaps needs the law sorting out, then, so e.g. digital signatures are equivalent.

The quality of internet lines  etc  is appalling and my business will not be switching over in a hurry ( depsite having a system that allows me to do this)The number of poor quality phone calls form Uk companies that I get on such systems is unreal at times.

I will be clinging on until the last minute.

Spot on.VOIP is appalling if you do international stuff.

Hi Neil - you obviously never have power cuts and live somewhere with good mobile reception. We have 2 - 3 power cuts every winter and have no mobile phone coverage whatsoever. What do you recommend we do to report power cuts to Electricity North West? Quite often they don't pick them up with their remote monitoring. And what about 999 calls?

Bad VOIP is appalling if you do international stuff.  If Zoom can do decent quality calls with video, simple VOIP can be done.

I dislike international phone calls more than Zoom because satellite lag is incredibly frustrating.

I guess the answer for you would be a battery-backed-up router through which the calls would be made as VOIP.

It's easier to sort workarounds than to keep the whole PSTN going for a small minority of people.

Thats nothing .Power cuts - every few weeks. Usually reinstated pretty quickly aas its a decent size town.And Siemens up the road is also taken down.

I have this irate phone call everytime BT talk to me about switching over.There seems to be a refusal to acknowledge that for Intl calls the 2025 changeover is not good.

Not every business allows you to use Zoom, its a security nightmare.

PSTN telephone calls are *not* secure at all, so that is a false comparison.  If anything Zoom is probably *more* secure, though I'd agree it is not perfect.

Not many businesses these days that don't have an IP conferencing solution.  Teams is maybe more common than Zoom.

I wouldn't knock Luddites altogether. When the motor industry eventually realises that putting all a car's internal controls except steering and braking onto a touchscreen is actually A Very Bad Idea, you will have the Luddite mindset to thank for it.

This is because international VoIP is full of carriers using speech compression techniques in order to get more calls down the same amount of bandwidth - international transmission capacity is sold on bandwidth whereas voice is sold on minutes, so the more minutes you can get out of your bandwidth the more money you can make.  A full quality 64kbps call on PSTN actually uses about 96Kbps when converted to IP, but compression will only use ~4kbps.  Traditional mobile quality voice is 9.6kbps.  It's crap but you can understand what the other person is saying due to your brain intelligently deciphering things. Unfortunately faxes don't do that  . South Africa is particularly bad. You wouldn't believe the stuff going on to reduce international costs - pump the call into the internet in the UK, pull it out at the far end and pump it into a box full of 'local' pay as you go SIM cards and use those to make a cheap local call to the destination. Ever made an international call only to be told you haven't got enough credit on your account? That's 'cos the PAYG SIM that's being used to make the final leg of the call has run out of credit.

Zoom is also a lot better than it was, they've had to improve their security or lose out on the business market.

Exactly. People will be encouraged to migrate until there's a 'hardcore' left at the end who can be supplied with battery backup. Once 'naked DSL' comes in where you don't have to buy a LL to have BB they number of lines to migrate will plummet.

Apparently BT consider 2 dropouts a day to be acceptable on its business VDSL service! The main cause of poor speech quality  for UK businesses is lack of QoS on their internal network. There's also a number who've jumped in early (seduced by low costs) and are using compression / shared bandwidth on their connections to the rest of the world.  The reality is that calls will be perfect if you use full-quality G711 speech and allow sufficient bandwidth.  This actually means you use more bandwidth than you used to use with the PSTN (how ironic), but of course you gain because the drop in bandwidth cost is higher than the increased bandwidth you're using.

This is the 'holy grail' of fixed-mobile convergence - when you get home your mobile authenticates on the network using your wifi and BB instead of the mobile network, or your phone calls route to the home phone instead. 'Voice over LTE' (IP voice direct on 4/5G) is a stepping stone to this, but there are issues with moving between the networks - currently a mobile will handover connectivity between cell sites as the signal strength and range changes, but handing off to Wifi is a whole different kettle of fish.

Definitely.  Blockchain would help ease this problem too.

There are plenty of ways of doing conferencing 

I doubt in 4 years it will be solved.

When there are serious problems caused by adverse weather the authorities do a pretty good job in solving them, but it takes time and potentially there could be problems, eg someone where a fallen tree has taken out the power and needs help.

There are a some people who can't cope with modern technology, even something most of us find simple to use.

Dave

Which is why things like this are sold:

https://www.vodafone.co.uk/mobile/phones/pay-as-you-go/alcatel/20-03

Cost £8.  Yes, £8.

What people can cope with is all related to the user interface, not the underlying tech.  If it works like a landline, who cares if it actually is one or not?

Is that really Luddite, or is it a recognition that it is a Very Good Thing (tm) for any controls in a car that you might want to use when driving to be usable without looking at them?

That said, I suspect a move to voice operation, which is even more preferable because you don't need to take your hands off the wheel to knock the temperature up a degree, will render this all a bit of a non-issue.

It will need to nvolve some hefty upgrades for some quite large rural areas.

Our current "rural broadband" cpnnection over copper does not support fast or consistent enough upload speeds for VOIP to work.

i wouldn't want to rely on voice recognition for any operation that involved safety. I'd limit its use to turning up and down the volume of the fake V10 exhaust sound coming from my little electric motor.

What safety features do cars use touchscreens for?  I thought it was stuff like the aircon, radio, satnav etc.  We're only talking about replacing those with voice activation.

I deliberately bought a base model to avoid touchscreens and leather seats as I dislike both!

I have used the landline to call the power supplier when we have had power cuts.  They are not so unusual here, nor are scheduled interruptions of service for  half a day.  During a 2 day power outage due to a storm we were able to use the phone and internet on a battery powered laptop on dialup

The only time we lost the landline was when BT gave our line to a new subscriber, hamfisted of someone.

I don't really know what features are touchscreen operated now but I consider demisters and lights to have a contribution to driving safety. Like you i would make a point of having the least touchscreen based operations in the event of buying a new car. A t the moment i am able to drive around in my old Octavia having pulled the fuse out of my CD player/ radio because of an issue with it. If a touchscreen dominated car still lets you drive around comfortably with a broken or deactivated  touchscreen, then I won't have a complaint. (apart from the cost of the touchscreen and all its peripherals)

during the storm I referred to not only was mains power out for 2 days but there were numerous mobile outages too that lasted for days.

Fully automatic lights are likely to be the norm before they go anywhere near touchscreens.  The demister is an interesting one - "if the aircon is on it won't mist" is probably the modern-day answer.

But no landline outages?  Surprising given that some of the distribution is typically above ground.

no, landlines were fine - I tried powering an old thinkpad from a car battery and we got the internet up on dial-up and used the phone normally.  It took about a day for the BBC other than BBC Cumbria to begin reporting the scale of the problems round here.  

Copper lines in our area of Sweden were pulled out 6 or 7 years ago. Folk kept their landline style number and were given a little dongle. There were or are no capacity issues. 

The electricity lines for all but the highest voltages were already buried and the fibre runs all the way into your house through miles of buried conduit, so they can add, replace, upgrade, as required.

Power outages are exceedingly rare as the system is now pretty much storm proof. It also means the view is better too. 

Downside is it's not cheap and the user pays eventually one way or another. 

Agree, I wonder how it's going to work with say many of the 4 million over 80 year olds, even though they may already have an emergency Alcatel type mobile. I wouldn't be surprised if it's put back like the switch to digital radio.  

Case in point my mother-in-law has altzheimers and cannot use a mobile phone (she has one but she forgets how to switch it on, then cannot navigate the menu, then forgets to charge it up, etc.) with the landline she only has to remember to put the reciever back.

I can only get decent recetion in one room of my house. My ex can't get decent reception anywhere in her house. She phones me on the landline when we need to talk. We live in a major city.

That's not a case for landlines.  That's a case for super simple plug-in mobiles that work like landlines for such users.

Cheaper to fix that than to continue maintaining the PSTN.

Even cheaper to not fix.

Well, yes, but that won't really be acceptable.

I suspect picocells connected to your fibre broadband are likely to be the fix for this sort of situation.  Vodafone already do them (I think the product is called SureSignal), I imagine the others will in due course.

Edit: Oh, they're stopping it because Wifi calling from your phone also works.  Good point there.  Why doesn't that work for you?

Precisely but they don't exist.

It has long been my beef that most modern tech is driven by young or middle aged people and is totally unsuitable to the old. I have to adjust Dad's central heating for him even because the damn menu is so complicated, infact i barely understand it myself. He ditched his internet because it just confused him.

https://shop.alzheimers.org.uk/helpful-products/telephones?gclid=Cj0KCQjwlM...

Several simple to use mobiles there.

Have it swapped for a simple on-off switch and rotary thermostat, then.

Very useful phone idea.

Perversely dad's boiler is in the attic where he can't easliy get to it.

But I think the point still stands that modern tech arrives complicated as standared and you have to make extra adjustments to make them simple.

Same here. To get reception on my mobile I either have to go upstairs to the front bedroom window, or else go out into the street. I live in a terraced house close to a city centre.

Why is it still the case that you do have to buy a landline to get DSL service? That's always seemed odd to me.

People likely said the same about VCRs and microwaves in the 80s. But, I agree we should be mindful of older generations and have simplified options so they too can benefit from improvement in technology. 

The whole system was built around the phone number. Get rid of the phone number and how do you record a service? You can't go round leaving dead phone numbers to record BB services as they're in short supply.  It's also a nifty way to extract more money out of the customer until such a time as the cost has been transferred to the connectivity, which takes time to do. In essence, the voice connectivity part of line rental is tiny compared to the cable to your house.  What should happen is there should be line rental for the connectivity + service cost for BB and/or service cost for voice.

If I'm being charitable, the line maintainance costs have to come from somewhere.

The PSTN change came up at work yesterday, apparently it's going to impact lots of outstations on water company sites.  Suspect there is actually quite a lot of kit out there beyond faxes which will require upgrades, albeit not much in your average residential customers house.

I expect a lot of Future Scam calls to be based on this (analogue landline switchoff) premise

For sure. There's already plenty of 'Hi we're BT, you haven't paid your bill so we're going to diconnect your internet unless you press 1.....' scam calls.

Outrageous.  First they shut down all the remaining public conveniences, and now this...

We use 'Wi-Fi Calling' to get around poor mobile reception at home - it works brilliantly.  I believe most networks & smart phones offer this now?

And then my work DDI line is over VOIP that uses an app on the phone - this also works very well.

My phone (a year-ish old Motorola so nothing posh) also does calling over 4G rather than "1G".  I think we're pretty much there with VOIP to be honest

Fairly sure I recall 5G is only VOIP, i.e. there isn't a built-in phone call option?

Given how young people rave about the tech in the Tesla Model 3 and just how angry I got at the ******* thing, wanting to drive without taking your eyes of the road is a Luddite tenancy.  Touchscreen distraction is a natural extension of the status quo for the increasing fraction of people who have no idea where they are and rely on a satnav or phone stuck to their windscreen to get them from A to B.  

Only if it's a lot better than current voice activation, and if it works with all combinations of road noise, child noise, baby noise, music, conversation with the passenger, wind sound with the roof down and so on, and is as low latency as current controls.  Which it probably isn't because you either have to press a button or address the system vocally to prime it for a command, in which time I could have done anything that needs doing in my car without taking my eyes off the road, skipping a conversational beat or having my hand off the wheel for - at worst - less than a second.

Tesla put the air conditioning controls on the touchscreen.  If the weather changes and you suddenly fog up on the motorway, they're a critical safety control.  Because they have morons on the design team, the Infotainment unit (which includes the touchscreen) logs data to the same embedded SD card as the OS and system stuff runs from.   Because they're actually sub-moron level they didn't look at the rate of logging and specs of the SD card, and so the SD cards exceeded their lifetime write capabilities (which are really quite low and aren't designed for intensive write cycles) and broke.  In their thousands.  Because they're unfit to be employed writing safety critical software, these sub-moron level software "engineers" didn't put in fail safe mode of operation for the critical features, and so when the card died, the infotainment unit died, and basically all controls - including lights (if not already set to auto) and windscreen demist died.  Including when driving.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/11/after-12523-replacements-feds-investig... 

Edit: Top comment from the Ars article:

When they said an electric car has fewer moving parts to break and should therefore be more reliable, they clearly didn't expect a bunch of software engineers to step in and fill the void.

Someone else said that too, but I wonder if you're "doing it wrong" to some extent.  Surely the point of a modern car with climate control is that you set your preferred ambient temperature and just leave it?  As the aircon would be running continuously, it wouldn't mist to start with, as aircon removes moisture anyway.

I don't know if the MCU crashing takes out auto-control of the aircon as well, it seems likely.

But no, I don't think that this falls under "doing it wrong".  When I drive with the AC on (which is far from always, as it's often not needed and wastes diesel/electricity) I tend to have it on 50/50 face/footwells which is little use if the windscreen starts to mist up.  Which it can do with A/C on face/footwells - especially when driving in to the kind of monster storms you get in the US.

Ah, I always have mine on the windscreen, as I prefer having a more indirect airflow.

I do still prefer a physical control panel, though.

That said because aircon removes moisture generally it shouldn't mist wherever it's pointed, as it will reduce the moisture in the car as a whole.  Though if you want fast demisting pointing at the screen does that.

We were switched over yesterday. We were told our landline wouldn't work in future and we needed to connect the phone to our new BT box. Also if there was a power cut we would need a mobile to call emergency services. Not good if your area has no signal.

not just emergency services -  How do you report a power outrage - no internet, no telecomms?

I will keep a few radio batteries charged up and try contacting the authorities on HF radio on my old clansman - perhaps a trans oceanic aircraft with HF?

With a modern grid I believe they should know exactly how many households have lost power without anyone phoning in. 

I'd just have power bank in reserve. 

Longer term problems, I don't understand why every time a storm takes down a line they don't progressively replace with buried cable. 

The bigger problem is why it's acceptable for suppliers to have 99% of population coverage, it's 2021, every household should have fibre & 4g, plus every section of road should have 4g coverage.

We are not there when we still have too many homes without any form of connection that will reliably support VOIP.

About 3x the cost was a number I once  heard, and nobody wants to pay, especially if you can't guarantee getting a long term benefit from your contract.  See Pacific Gas and Electric in California if you want to see how much trouble 'saving' money can get you in.  They can't afford to bury cables, but storm downed cables causing massive wildfires bankrupted them

So 3+ storms in the lifetime of a cable and you're saving money as a nation, the public pays eventually regardless. It's just so short sighted, as usual. 

Plus, it's not just the actual cost of over versus underground, it's lost revenue, productivity etc.. every time the power goes off in an every increasing power and IT dependent world. All this talk of work from home, electric cars, air sourced pumps etc.. is useless if you can't protect the integrity of the grid with an every more severe or disrupted climate. 

This thread is clearly heavily loaded with fair weather feckw1ts with too much faith in underdeveloped technologies and no idea whatsoever about creating systems for resilient public safety. British technological capability is routinely eroded by commercial expediency and I expect this change to have no immunity from that disease. 

Because it's expensive with a longterm payback, and UK businesses generally have a short-term mentality. Senior management who are only in the job for 2-5 years want a quick buck to make themselves look good on LinkedIn to help them get their next job. "I reduced maintenance costs by 20%" looks much better than "I spent loads of money".

My firm used to proactively move overhead telecoms lines underground to reduce faults but that stopped when another company took over and wanted more short-term profitability.

You'd think it came under government controlled critical infrastructure, 2-5 margins are kind of irrelevant, when it might take a decade to complete, but pay back for a century. Either I'm sure there will be news reports of power loss when the normal autumn weather arrives.