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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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".
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> … 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?
> 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.)
[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.
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...)
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.
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
> 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?
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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s too bad, in California it’s all the same:
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/internet-and-p...
“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.
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.
From https://fedlaws.org/best-efforts-standard-in-contracts-ucc-r...
"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".
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud2LaFDEUho
This makes me think that the marketing at AT&T is outsourced to a group that has no idea how the service works.
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.
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...
> 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.
> 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.
Verizon forces me if I want battery backup for my ONT to provide 12 D cell batteries.
https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/battery-backup/p...
What a fuckin' joke.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
my new 2.5 Gb fios ont eliminated the battery, when power goes it goes as well
Would plugging the ONT into a UPS work?
Err yeah except actually you'll just pull out your mobile phone and use that.
Not possible for a lot of rural areas
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.
[1] https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/09/openreach-laun...
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.
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.
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.
> Anyone with concerns should contact their provider, but the responsibility cannot rest with customers alone.
Best of luck contacting your provider
"For a list of ways technology has failed to improved society... press #3"
Britland is apparently an informal term for England/Britain.
So all of it.
oh it is el Reg, cheeky bastards
Finland a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786868
California's also been fighting this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/att-loses-key-ru...
> … 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?
> 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.)
I had to google what is Britland. First time in my life seeing this term used.
FYI, it’s a synonym for Great Britain, as in the island.
No it's not, this is just the Register being the Register. Britain would have worked just fine.
[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.
Most voip providers should be able to do this, like voip.ms
Where is Britland?
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.
I did like "no extensions"
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.
You deserve a Tip for that one! You're one smooth Operator!
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...)
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.
It was obvious to me. The article uses "Britain" and "UK"
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.
> 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.
I figured it's anywhere they squack is theirs or was theirs ;-)
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.
It's still using the same cables if you're not using fttp. Just that the phone is connected through the router first.
The question is reliability.
most landlines in continental Europe are already VoIP
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
> 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?
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.
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...
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).
https://www.findmespot.com/en-gb
I'm sure you've considered satellite. As backup for the 999 service, maybe one of the emergency 2-way pagers carried by hikers?
Internet services are the new walled city? -- be cast out at your own peril; suits the State just fine
It's not like it's banned, they're just not offering it any more. Feel free to make your own communication network.
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