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 has heard of.
*land is a common enough suffix in the UK though; I often say things like 'I'm not sure how it's done in Microsoft land' or 'the fallout of my trip to bodge land'. 'Britland' is a fairly transparent construction along these lines.
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.
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.
In some places of Europe, the internet ADSL technology on the copper wires, the same as used for PSTN phones, deliver higher speed (realistically an order of few Mbps) compared to congested LTE/4G mobile networks (1-3 Mbps). The mobile network providers don't guarantee minumim speeds, and customers (typically older people) that move from ADSL to LTE/4G, are left with degraded service without a possibility to object.
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.
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.
An awareness campaign won't help. The problem is that people get some shitty router/AP provided for free by their ISP which they set up at the far end of the house on the same channel as fifty other shitty ISP-provided routers in range and then complain about their TikTok videos stalling. Once they switch to 4G all their problems go away, so they stay with 4G because that "works" and WiFi "doesn't work".
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
Yes. This switch off doesn't somehow miraculously delete the copper cables, it just switches off a particular service offered on those cables.
However the service you're describing is not ADSL, in which the DSL endpoint is in the exchange where all of an area's copper cables met but instead VDSL where the nearby local cabinet processes the DSL signals and is itself provided with fibre.
With VDSL the copper cable is maybe moving your Internet 100 metres, with ADSL it might be several kilometres, and so ADSL can't do 30 down 8 up, the most it's going to try is something like 12 down 2 up.
I’ve got some adsl speed at work in some location which are limited to under 8/1, which is fine as they are replacing isdn (which is also being turned off), service is sites. I assume it’s a similar technology to adsl.
From what I can tell, dsl of any type didn’t really take off in America.
> From what I can tell, dsl of any type didn’t really take off in America.
VDSL was the core of the AT&T U-verse offerings in the US for a good decade perhaps a little more. This was marketed as a full cable replacement, as it included Internet, TV (including the normal cable channels), and optionally landline phone (over ip, but without some of the normal headaches of VOIP, as AT&T could treat this more like a digitized POTS line on their side, much like the normal pots lines they digitized behind the scenes). There were also some other smaller deployments here and there, but that seemed to be the biggest one in the US.
ADSL/ADSL2/ADSL2+ certainly did exist, but to work well you need to be relatively close to the local exchange, needed copper wires in good condition, etc. It was offered fairly widely, like by most companies offering phone service over copper lines, but because the quality could vary quite significantly depending on things not obvious to the purchaser, it tended to get a bad-rap. If you tried it once, but was unluck enough to have it not work well, you would write off the tech, and tell all your firends not to bother, and go go with the cable offering.
For me personally, in its heyday, ADSL2 beat cable hands down, as in that time frame cable was only using a tiny fraction of its bandwidth to provide internet service, and only a few feeds coming out of the local office, so the amount of oversubscription was insane, and amounted to basically fraud, as you could only ever get anywhere near your advertised speed at like 4 am.
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.
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.)
VoLTE and SIP do indeed retail a lot of the concepts of circuit switched. The challenge is that now you have the complexity of (seemingly invariably) a Telco managing a k8s stack on an OS they don't understand, and which has hundreds of CVEs per month they aren't patching. The failure modes of VoLTE/SIP are also a load more complex than CS domain issues - IMS interop issues and XML parsing delights await!
So I guess it's not only about getting off the internet - there is a real shift in complexity in these more modern stacks too.
That’s not true at all. Yes to the k8s but at least at my work we are scanned to death as soon as a new IP comes up on our network. Plus we have golden image updates at least every 30 days. We couldn’t even get SNMP traps out of our virtual firewalls because of “security”.
Containers are 10x better than monitoring and supporting some 30 years old switch in a central office that consumes more power than my cul de sac.
I mean, going over the public internet gives you a pretty huge amount of redundancy. It’s common for individual companies to have outages, or one small neighborhood to have an issue, but has there ever been a global internet outage?
It doesn’t give you what POTS used to give you - several days of battery backup that kept the phone system working in the event of power failure. I remember the huge racks of lead-acid batteries in the old exchange buildings
The batteries were part of the trick, for sure. All of the telco gear ran on -48v, and was connected in parallel with the batteries.
In this way, grid power could come and go rapidly and the switches wouldn't even notice. There there was no handoff, or switchover time. The chemical batteries just changed from being held at a steady SoC to being discharged, which is something they can do without complaint or interruption. KISS.
After that, at least for the AT&T-built central office down the road from where I grew up, the generators would engage and keep things going indefinitely (or until fuel ceased to flow).
> 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]
> However, there hasn't been too much of an issue with transition to VoIP here, apart from
... providers bricking huge numbers of perfectly-good phones, in some cases brand new devices, because ACMA decided they weren't worthy of making emergency calls.
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.
> … 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?
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.
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.
Yeah for mine I've got the unifi cloud fibre gateway but currently use its sole poe port for a u7 lite. Thats on an APC UPS which will give me 3-4hrs life. Then for the ONT I've just picked up a relatively cheap Eaton UPS that should give it approximately 3-5hrs. TBH any outage longer than that and I'm out of the house for the day until its fixed!
> The premise is she needs something as reliable as a landline, because during California wildfires the cell towers and power go down.
How do you know that the lines were not affected if the towers and power went out? That was a huge blaze. That kind of thing you need a ham radio-not a power line.
This of course assumes copper thieves wouldn't steal the lines during the chaos.
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.
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 anti-vaxing
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.
Keeping everyone else quiet to remove the possibility of interference is just good sense. The Baofeng people alone would be a huge, unnecessary distraction.
> 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.
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.
This is already partially the case with POTS where I'm at. My wife was attached to this reliability aspect of the overpriced POTS service we had. But when they installed fiber to the node some years back they placed batteries at the nodes which seem to die after a day in a power outage. When everything came out of a CO they could just run a diesel generator for about forever in comparison.
The bright side was this helped me convince her to get rid of the POTS as the benefit she wanted was larger already gone anyway.
[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.
> 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...
> 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.)
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).
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
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 60.0 ms ] threadCalifornia's also been fighting this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/att-loses-key-ru...
Best of luck contacting your provider
I mean, boffin: fine. Everyone in the UK knows what that means. But britland isn't a term that anyone has heard of.
So pretty much anyone for whom the news is relevant would understand the headline immediately.
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.
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.
...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.
No phone signal of course.
However the service you're describing is not ADSL, in which the DSL endpoint is in the exchange where all of an area's copper cables met but instead VDSL where the nearby local cabinet processes the DSL signals and is itself provided with fibre.
With VDSL the copper cable is maybe moving your Internet 100 metres, with ADSL it might be several kilometres, and so ADSL can't do 30 down 8 up, the most it's going to try is something like 12 down 2 up.
I’ve got some adsl speed at work in some location which are limited to under 8/1, which is fine as they are replacing isdn (which is also being turned off), service is sites. I assume it’s a similar technology to adsl.
From what I can tell, dsl of any type didn’t really take off in America.
VDSL was the core of the AT&T U-verse offerings in the US for a good decade perhaps a little more. This was marketed as a full cable replacement, as it included Internet, TV (including the normal cable channels), and optionally landline phone (over ip, but without some of the normal headaches of VOIP, as AT&T could treat this more like a digitized POTS line on their side, much like the normal pots lines they digitized behind the scenes). There were also some other smaller deployments here and there, but that seemed to be the biggest one in the US.
ADSL/ADSL2/ADSL2+ certainly did exist, but to work well you need to be relatively close to the local exchange, needed copper wires in good condition, etc. It was offered fairly widely, like by most companies offering phone service over copper lines, but because the quality could vary quite significantly depending on things not obvious to the purchaser, it tended to get a bad-rap. If you tried it once, but was unluck enough to have it not work well, you would write off the tech, and tell all your firends not to bother, and go go with the cable offering.
For me personally, in its heyday, ADSL2 beat cable hands down, as in that time frame cable was only using a tiny fraction of its bandwidth to provide internet service, and only a few feeds coming out of the local office, so the amount of oversubscription was insane, and amounted to basically fraud, as you could only ever get anywhere near your advertised speed at like 4 am.
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 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.
So I guess it's not only about getting off the internet - there is a real shift in complexity in these more modern stacks too.
Containers are 10x better than monitoring and supporting some 30 years old switch in a central office that consumes more power than my cul de sac.
In this way, grid power could come and go rapidly and the switches wouldn't even notice. There there was no handoff, or switchover time. The chemical batteries just changed from being held at a steady SoC to being discharged, which is something they can do without complaint or interruption. KISS.
After that, at least for the AT&T-built central office down the road from where I grew up, the generators would engage and keep things going indefinitely (or until fuel ceased to flow).
- 2019: Verizon/BGP routing issue
- 2021: Verizon/FIOS routing issue
- 2021: Fastly CDN outage
- 2021: Comcast: San Francisco backbone outage
- 2021: Akamai: Edge DNS outage
- 2022: Rogers telecom routing issue
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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...
... providers bricking huge numbers of perfectly-good phones, in some cases brand new devices, because ACMA decided they weren't worthy of making emergency calls.
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.
... like one Fax machine?
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?
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.
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.
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
How do you know that the lines were not affected if the towers and power went out? That was a huge blaze. That kind of thing you need a ham radio-not a power line.
This of course assumes copper thieves wouldn't steal the lines during the chaos.
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.
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 anti-vaxing
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 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.
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.
The bright side was this helped me convince her to get rid of the POTS as the benefit she wanted was larger already gone anyway.
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...
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.)
So all of it.
oh it is el Reg, cheeky bastards
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).
[1] https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/09/openreach-laun...
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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...