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Ultra fast fibre with old telephone?

dweezil said:
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.
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Yeah, our village finally got FTTP fully funded through a Community Fibre Partnership at the third attempt after the funding rules were changed and fewer people were required to sign up. Needless to say, none of this was publicised very widely and the rollout by BT and Openreach was an absolute shitshow.

Amazing service now though.
 
Ponty said:
This is another example of backwards progress. No emergency phone call possible without electricity (assuming fallen trees haven’t taken overhead phone lines out).
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I tried using the GPO 232 the last time there was a power outage here to establish what the status was at the electric company, but I couldn’t navigate the call-tree at all as the phone obviously hasn’t got a # or * on the pulse dial. I don’t think anything on the call-tree worked at all (i.e. it would have been tone not pulse). I guess there are some ‘80s line-powered push-button tone-dial phones that have the keys, but obviously a modern wireless landline phone won’t work as the basestation will have lost power.
 
Tony L said:
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.
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!
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I assume you have already done this bit:
CONVERTING OLD GPO/BT PHONES TO PLUG & SOCKET (britishtelephones.com)
So, if you can get the phone to ring when attached to your DSL router’s “Phone” socket, rather than directly to the wall, then the phone will continue to work when/if your connection switches to fibre.

If you want to fake it, the bell should ring “properly” when fed a 50 Volt square-wave at 25 Hz. The ring-pattern is 3.0 seconds long, each cycle is 0.4 s of ringing; 0.2 s of silence; 0.4 s ringing; 2.0 s silence.
(In a previous life, I wrote software for those hospital bedside phone-and-TV things; It was important that the ring-tone timing was exactly right, so that patients would recognise the phone amongst all the other things that go beep in a modern hospital.)
 
KrisW said:
So, if you can get the phone to ring when attached to your DSL router’s “Phone” socket, rather than directly to the wall, then the phone will continue to work when/if your connection switches to fibre.
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Interesting. My 232 is converted as described in the article. I have however never owned a DSL router with a phone socket, I never realised that was even a thing!
 
Good Evening All,

The whole process around phone provision to our property (and the 5/6 others adjacent) has been an uphill struggle since we moved in and, up to a point, it goes with living relatively remotely (if you can call 15 miles from Inverurie, 12 miles from Huntly and 5 miles from Insch "remote"?). Living in a shallow valley doesn't help either.

When we moved in in 2000 we still had dial up which was a nightmare as poorly maintained electric fencing caused havoc. The distance from the exchange combined with the increase in contention made the phrase "Broadband" almost laughable. As I said we get maybe 1.3Mb here but we get 70MB+ at the flat in town and we were expected to pay the same price for both services.

Nobody, as yet, has indicated what will happen here if this switch off occurs in 2025. BT want silly money to run fibre to us whereas I say just how difficult is it to mole plough the conduit down the road to us. Yes it is 2.1miles but there are other properties en route all of whom I'm sure would be willing to put whatever grant is going in to a common pot. There will be services to work around and god alone knows what is involved in gaining permission/ wayleaves etc. Maybe I should look up what is involved and start up a community action group???

Regards

Richard
 
As I understood it, the copper lines will be de commissioned and eventually removed when an area has been 'fibered'. IE. The new ultrafast cables are installed onto the poles by your house and connected to your nearest green box. Then switch on. Then, about 3 04 years later, the copper will be removed.
 
We are moving from a fast 100mbps Virgin cable to a crappy old BT wire property. Interesting to see suppliers quoting various speed/price options at that address, some using the term fibre. Are speeds of 67mbps realistic in this scenario as they claim.

also Vodafone is available with cheap pricing- any draw backs?
 
TheDecameron said:
We are moving from a fast 100mbps Virgin cable to a crappy old BT wire property. Interesting to see suppliers quoting various speed/price options at that address, some using the term fibre. Are speeds of 67mbps realistic in this scenario as they claim.
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Could be some VDSL variant.
 
TheDecameron said:
We are moving from a fast 100mbps Virgin cable to a crappy old BT wire property. Interesting to see suppliers quoting various speed/price options at that address, some using the term fibre. Are speeds of 67mbps realistic in this scenario as they claim.

also Vodafone is available with cheap pricing- any draw backs?
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Use the wholesale checker to get full info
https://www.broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com/#/ADSL

​
 
There are no spares for traditional telephone exchanges now, they stopped making the chips years ago as the telcos stopped buying
 
Rockmeister said:
As I understood it, the copper lines will be de commissioned and eventually removed when an area has been 'fibered'. IE. The new ultrafast cables are installed onto the poles by your house and connected to your nearest green box. Then switch on. Then, about 3 04 years later, the copper will be removed.
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Yes, that's more or less what's happened to us. Now on a single thin overhead fibre line for FTTP, , which was installed about three years ago, & the old copper overhead line removed recently. the fibre's been rock-solid since it was installed. As part of the changes needed for a car charging point, UK Power Networks are coming in January to run our power cable underground to the cottage (apparently, having the connectors on the side of the house when you've a thatched roof's a big no-no these days), plus we're getting upgraded consumer units from the electricity supplier. None of these works are costing us anything.

We're in a small rural lane, and the arrival of the fibre lines came completely out of the blue. It now runs all the way to a very isolated farmhouse at the far end where the lane ends, and was laid practically overnight. The device that laid it underground left almost no sign of its work, just a ripple in the grass.
 
despite tales of dodgy coms, I have gone BT package.
3 weeks faster instal that Zen; £15 cheaper; free 2 digital telephones which allow normal phone coms (maybe a new number, as yet unsure), whereas Zen have no phone line facility. It's about £46 a month for phones, 70 'free' mins of phone calls, new router, instal and 150 Mbs ultrafast with no price hike mid contract.

I thought it sounded fine.
 
Vodafone were doing broadband for £20 pm, way below BT, then I read the online reviews and decided to pay for BT. There are so many companies now where the only means of getting anything sorted is by phoning them. I spent hours trying to get house insurance and gave up on two companies after being asked to recite verbally every item worth over a certain amount.
 
Tony L said:
Interesting. My 232 is converted as described in the article. I have however never owned a DSL router with a phone socket, I never realised that was even a thing!
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Some boxes give full 48V and a strong ring, others cheat with a 24V PABX port and rather feeble ring that won't always operate a real bell
 
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