Ultra fast fibre with old telephone?

[Rockmeister]

Do the wise have any information or advice please, on what happens when Ultra fast fibre is installed, to the telephone. I understand that all the copper cable is to be removed soon and telephone calls will come down the fibre instead. But are conventional telephones available That will receive that signal, or is it going to be something like Skype or face time et cetera. Any info much appreciated thank you.

 

[KrisW]

Do the wise have any information or advice please, on what happens when Ultra fast fibre is installed, to the telephone. I understand that all the copper cable is to be removed soon and telephone calls will come down the fibre instead. But are conventional telephones available That will receive that signal, or is it going to be something like Skype or face time et cetera. Any info much appreciated thank you.

Short answer: Yes.

Fibre comes to the premises, and is converted to Ethernet by a small box (the “CPE Gateway”). A regular Cat-6 twisted-pair (“Ethernet”) patch-cable runs from that gateway to your Wifi router, into which you can plug other wired-network devices.

The Wifi-router, or the CPE Gateway itself, will have a telephone socket on it, into which you may plug your existing POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phone. But, as both the wi-fi router and the CPE gatway require mains power to operate, you will not have a working phone service if there is a power outage between your house and the telephone exchange.

(The traditional copper phone service has 50 Volts DC between the two cables, which is used to power the domestic phone itself, which is how it could operate even with your electrical supply disconnected)

 

[foxwelljsly]

Some providers will provide a new wireless VOIP handset FOC with your router. This connects wirelessly via wifi to the router.

We recently migrated from copper to fibre with BT and retained our old number and got a free handset. Calls are 20p a minute unless you buy minutes in advance (£7 for 700).

 

[Rockmeister]

Some providers will provide a new wireless VOIP handset FOC with your router. This connects wirelessly via wifi to the router.

We recently migrated from copper to fibre with BT and retained our old number and got a free handset. Calls are 20p a minute unless you buy minutes in advance (£7 for 700).

Now that sounds good. I was looking at Zen since Which mag like them so much but pal down road is an ex telecoms engiuneer and he still likes BT. And they are cheaper.

 

[Copperjacket]

This is something that requires serious consideration since the recent power cuts knocked out all broadband and mobile phone services.

 

[sq225917]

We're still on pots here in sunny Sheffield no fibre to the house, not an option.

 

[Marchbanks]

The Ceremonial Yellow 746 is still used here in the kitchens on the BT 300Mbps connection.

 

[mansr]

Nothing says you can't have both fibre and copper lines, though you'll obviously have to pay for both.

 

[foxwelljsly]

Nothing says you can't have both fibre and copper lines, though you'll obviously have to pay for both.

Copper services will not be available after 2025,so you may as well make the leap now and get used to it.

 

[Tony L]

Someone needs to design an interface box so I can still get my 1934 GPO 232 and No 1 bellset to ring. It has to be possible. I assume the bell takes a given voltage & frequency and the phone would need some kind of DAC/ADC type thing. Everyone will want one.

The bell is on the bottom shelf behind my cassette investment stash. To be honest the bell is the important bit, the phone is just an ornament really even though it works perfectly. If I can’t get the bell to work post 2025 I’ll just give up the land line all together. To be honest the bell is the only reason I keep it now! It just sounds so cool!

 

[foxwelljsly]

Short answer: Yes.

Fibre comes to the premises, and is converted to Ethernet by a small box (the “CPE Gateway”). A regular Cat-6 twisted-pair (“Ethernet”) patch-cable runs from that gateway to your Wifi router, into which you can plug other wired-network devices.

The Wifi-router, or the CPE Gateway itself, will have a telephone socket on it, into which you may plug your existing POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phone. But, as both the wi-fi router and the CPE gatway require mains power to operate, you will not have a working phone service if there is a power outage between your house and the telephone exchange.

(The traditional copper phone service has 50 Volts DC between the two cables, which is used to power the domestic phone itself, which is how it could operate even with your electrical supply disconnected)

Cheers, BTW. I didn't realise the bt phone socket on the smarthub2 was for a standard phone, just wired our old dual wireless handset back up. Handy when you live in a mobile blackspot.

 

[foxwelljsly]

Now that sounds good. I was looking at Zen since Which mag like them so much but pal down road is an ex telecoms engiuneer and he still likes BT. And they are cheaper.

Fibre to the premises should be a lot more stable than adsl or vdsl over ageing copper, so things should go wrong less frequently, so how bad an ISP is when things go wrong should be less of an issue. BT's customer service is bad to a Kafkaesque level, but we're paying £65 a month for 900MBit/s broadband and 700 minutes of call time, which isn't bad. I probably went a bit mad with the bandwidth, but that's still less than I was paying for our 2x 3mbits adsl lines previously.

 

[Mike Reed]

Calls are 20p a minute

Jeez. The amount of time you have to hang on (after being answered) with many companies and gov't bodies would soon rack up a hefty bill. Okay if you don't use it, I s'pose.

I still have and use the BT cordless quad I had when on BT copper (Virgin since 2009) and all works well. As does my very old BT handset from 25+ years ago. No electronic gimmickry needed but I did need ADHL (?) filters for my computer when I had BT, which was a pain.

 

[MUTTY1]

Jeez. The amount of time you have to hang on (after being answered) with many companies and gov't bodies would soon rack up a hefty bill. Okay if you don't use it, I s'pose.

15,25,30 minutes recently just get in touch with my bank. If this gets worse it will take longer than driving to my local branch… and the music! which is interrupted every thirty seconds by ‘we appreciate your custom but employ just enough colleagues to keep you on hold just long enough to not bother us again.’ Have a nice day…

 

[RJohan]

Remember, with fast fibre you will be able to talk much faster, making the calls shorter, therefore cheaper. Or?

 

[Ponty]

This is something that requires serious consideration since the recent power cuts knocked out all broadband and mobile phone services.

This is another example of backwards progress. No emergency phone call possible without electricity (assuming fallen trees haven’t taken overhead phone lines out).

 

[Richard Lines]

Copper services will not be available after 2025,so you may as well make the leap now and get used to it.

I think I'll have to declare that as being not true. We live around 5.5km from our local exchange. The telephone line is actually 7.8km long (determined by an Openreach engineer pinging when checking faults in the past). The nearest fibre green box is 2.1miles away. We have been told (confirmed) by the PTB only one month ago that fibre will not find its way to our premises (R100 scheme in Scotland - https://www.scotlandsuperfast.com/?). We have not been advised that the conventional line is to be removed at any point.

We have poor mobile phone coverage. We do use an external mobile aerial and router which, on a good day will give us 10Mb and also have a satellite dish which can give 35Mb. Tried VOIP (Vonage) and it wasn't overly successful so try to make all calls via Wi-Fi Calling over the iPhone.

The only 'reliable' system at the end of the day is the good old BT phone and line.

Regards

Richard

 

[foxwelljsly]

I think I'll have to declare that as being not true. We live around 5.5km from our local exchange. The telephone line is actually 7.8km long (determined by an Openreach engineer pinging when checking faults in the past). The nearest fibre green box is 2.1miles away. We have been told (confirmed) by the PTB only one month ago that fibre will not find its way to our premises (R100 scheme in Scotland - https://www.scotlandsuperfast.com/?). We have not been advised that the conventional line is to be removed at any point.

We have poor mobile phone coverage. We do use an external mobile aerial and router which, on a good day will give us 10Mb and also have a satellite dish which can give 35Mb. Tried VOIP (Vonage) and it wasn't overly successful so try to make all calls via Wi-Fi Calling over the iPhone.

The only 'reliable' system at the end of the day is the good old BT phone and line.

Regards

Richard

Sorry, my bad, some copper may be retained, but not standard phone services. Openreach have been very vague on just how much, if any, copper will be retained and it was their intention that it would all be replaced with fibre, but this is looking unrealistic.

I'm really not sure anyone in the UK will have a PSTN phone line much after 2025. Openreach, BT and DCMS have all declared that all domestic and business PSTN (standard phone) services will be switching off in the UK in 2025 or shortly after.

You might be keeping your copper cable, but I would be very surprised if you still have a PSTN exchange to connect it to much after 2025. If they don't upgrade you to fibre, I'd guess they might migrate your PSTN/ADSL service to VDSL over copper to the nearest fibre cabinet without a PSTN service, but I'm not sure on that one.

Of course, it is BT and Openreach saying this, and given their collective record on project delivery, I don't have complete confidence this will happen within the declared timescales, but it will happen.

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

 

[dweezil]

I think I'll have to declare that as being not true. We live around 5.5km from our local exchange. The telephone line is actually 7.8km long (determined by an Openreach engineer pinging when checking faults in the past). The nearest fibre green box is 2.1miles away. We have been told (confirmed) by the PTB only one month ago that fibre will not find its way to our premises (R100 scheme in Scotland - https://www.scotlandsuperfast.com/?). We have not been advised that the conventional line is to be removed at any point.

We have poor mobile phone coverage. We do use an external mobile aerial and router which, on a good day will give us 10Mb and also have a satellite dish which can give 35Mb. Tried VOIP (Vonage) and it wasn't overly successful so try to make all calls via Wi-Fi Calling over the iPhone.

The only 'reliable' system at the end of the day is the good old BT phone and line.

Regards

Richard

We were in a similar position but benefitted from a subsidised scheme. Could be worth keeping an eye out as it was in discrete tranches with nothing going on in between. I signed up years ago and it took four years for them to get enough customers to make it viable here with a £1500 subsidy for FTTP. 300Mb most of the time and i'll cancel the satellite sub next year when the contract runs out.

 

[Amber Audio]

This is another example of backwards progress. No emergency phone call possible without electricity (assuming fallen trees haven’t taken overhead phone lines out).

Battery backup box with 24 hours charge and 1 hour of talk is one solution - spare batteries or a UPS can beef up the time. About 2% of UK cannot get any broadband using normal ADSL.