Landline only for aged relatives

WOTSWOT

Such a wonderful facility as a pure copper telephone landline, powered from 50V battery with a backup diesel generator at the main telephone exchange is being phased out. It is the end of a golden era, lasting nearly a century, where reliability and accessibility for everyone was the top priority. Since 1987 I have had only three occasions where I lost my phone service. So on average only one outage every 13 years.

Land phones, as opposed to mobile phones are being moved over to the internet as part of a wonderful new dawn of digital upgrades. The last time I lost my internet was just over a week ago, where ironically I was being moved over to EE as Plusnet are losing their phone landline facilities. When I reported the fault I was told it was an external fault and engineers would need up to 48 hours to fix it. As it was a Thursday, that could mean waiting until the following Tuesday in order to fix the fault.

I was easily able to report the fault as my phone was unaffected by the internet outage, in the same way it can survive any power failure at my home or at the telephone exchange. This wonderful feeling of security of communications will soon become a distant memory.

brewerdave

@WOTSWOT - Everyone in positions of power (ie politicians!) have chosen to believe the lies of the Telecoms industry of "99%+ coverage" of mobile phone networks.

I wonder why so many are dependent on wifi calling via their router then ?? .

EnPointe

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82028427#Comment_82028427

99% coverage is not a lie

you seem to be dispalying a remarkabley naive appreciation of GHz band propagation

flaneurs_lobster

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82036292#Comment_82036292

I have no doubt that the 4 (3?) networks have 100% coverage of my property.

Unfortunately the nature of the construction means that their 'GHz band propagation' to the interior is 0%.

Entirely dependent on wi-fi calling for phone use, hence the concern of some about the lack of robustness in the event of power loss.

MouldyOldDough

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82036292#Comment_82036292

It depends on the term "coverage" - I can connect to THREE data in my home at a very low speed (less than 100Kbps) - if that counts as connected - then yes….I can just about hold a phone conversation but it breaks up constantly - I assume that this is due to living in the shadow of surrounding houses ! EE is slightly better (2Mbps) but it's still slow

MouldyOldDough

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82036624#Comment_82036624

I discovered a few years ago that THREE had no working battery back up at my local transmitter - when we lost power - we lost phones as well