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 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.)
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.
...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.
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/internet-and-p...
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...
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.
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 MAHA
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Canada, Bell has actually discontinued battery backup in their latest modems, supposedly because they were having trouble with modems not rebooting correctly.
https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/battery-backup/p...
What a fuckin' joke.
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.
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.
Tricky bit is getting a good charger if you're getting them for a device that doesn't charge its own batteries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
California's also been fighting this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/att-loses-key-ru...
So all of it.
oh it is el Reg, cheeky bastards
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?
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 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...)
So pretty much anyone for whom the news is relevant would understand the headline immediately.
It sounds like it was a successful title. Click obtained.
I bet that makes the BNP/UKIP/Blackshirts/Reform/Tories suitably angry.
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
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...
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).