High speed fibre optic broadband rollout & landline phone services for the elderly

brewerdave

@Kernet - well worthwhile posting - ignore the critics!  A LOT of people are blissfully unaware of the implications of the old system shutdown.
We are in a similar position in that our PSTN service will switch off relatively soon but our ISP are not proposing offering a "true voice" type service plus appear to have no way to allow our phone number to be retained if we wanted to move it to a standalone VOIP provider.
This is important to us ,because like significant portions of the UK, we still have very poor 3G/4G mobile services in the house and no 5G coverage at all.

iniltous

Although not a Virgin phone customer ,  if they are  in the process of converting their PSTN customers onto IP telephony , with  customers on broadband being relatively easy , simply advising them of the different location  the phone needs plugging into ( the router not the master socket ) , for the phone only customers, VM will obviously need to be more interventionist, as effectively the non ‘broadband’ customer will have to become one , even if they don’t fully realise that’s what’s happening, and Ofcom have insisted that these consumers shouldn’t pay more for this IP telephony than they paid for PSTN telephony , unless VM are doing migration to IP telephony different to other Telcos, phone only will be the last customers to be done ( as they are logistically the most difficult ) 

I doubt that VM would leave deliberately leave anyone without telephony, but ( and I don’t know if this is being done already ) if they contact a telephone only customer and try to arrange a date to install the necessary equipment to enable IP telephony but get no response, then at some point the consumer may be disconnected , but in those circumstances is it VMs fault or the consumers fault in not responding to the request, but have they started doing this yet ?

If some have independently took a broadband service that they don’t want  ( adding to their costs ) thinking that they need to this themselves to keep telephony, rather than waiting to be contacted by VM , then that’s unfortunate but that would be the incorrect thing to do 

IP telephony not working  during a power cut is a different discussion