Landline phones will switch off across Britland in 100 days, no extensions

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.)

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.

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.

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.

> 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]

[1] https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2026-02/report/communic...

That’s too bad, in California it’s all the same:

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/internet-and-p...

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

my new 2.5 Gb fios ont eliminated the battery, when power goes it goes as well

Err yeah except actually you'll just pull out your mobile phone and use that.

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.

Neoliberalism: more profits, less service.

You should set an alarm to wake up at that time!

Cheeky at the expense of people knowing what they are talking about.

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.

Most voip providers should be able to do this, like voip.ms

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'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.

FYI, it’s a synonym for Great Britain, as in the island.

The question is reliability.

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.

It's not like it's banned, they're just not offering it any more. Feel free to make your own communication network.