Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines Openreach is warning British businesses that the old phone network shuts down in less than a year, with half a million commercial lines still unmigrated. BT Group's infrastructure arm is switching to an all-digital, IP-based service over fiber. To speed migration, it's hiking charges on legacy products. Deadlines for the …
PSTN analog network is obsolete, becoming harder to maintain and significantly more expensive to run,
How much of that extra expense is because the old PSTN was held to considerably higher standards of availability than the replacement IP network? If broadband had to meet the same standard it wouldn't necessarily be cheaper. See this article for example.
It mentions an Ofcom rule that the last remaining payphone in a 400m area has to have coverage from four mobile networks before BT can remove it. When there were four networks you often couldn't get one or two, and now there aren't even four networks.
If BT actually followed this rule then there would still be a lot of payphones remaining.
We use the landline as our main phone although so far the only call today has been an incoming spam call.
Of particular use are calls to Northen Powergrid to report another power fail. That's not going to be much use in the event of a power failure, not even with a UPS on the router as it's been known for the circuit that powers the local FTTC box to result in the broadband failing when houses on the other circuit from the substation were still powered.
As to the Telecare work, it seems rather vague as to how this has been remediated. Without a UPS there's no chance a straight digital connection via the router will work even if the broadband remains live. A mobile option might work given a signal.
Elderly aunt who relies on her landline (has no telecare just yet) was, once this had been pointed out to BT, sent a 12V UPS which powers both the router and the ONT, should be good for 2 or 3 hours apparently, which is better than nothing though nowhere near the "indefinitely" offered by POTS (assuming the exchange batteries and generator were in good nick).
BT router has an "analogue" port on the back and works well with normal phones. BT router also has DECT built-in, though she can't get the hang of needing to press the "offhook" button when making a call. They are set to pick up automatically when lifted off the charging cradle for an incoming call, but she still tends to rush down to the living room to answer on the "proper" phone, walking past at least one DECT handset on the way.
M.
My set-up is similar - BT sent the UPS when I explained that I have no mobile signal inside the house (and pretty much erratic and unusable outside). I still use the analogue phone plugged into the BT hub, and have never even bothered taking the DECT phone out of its box.
Pretty much all the time, for you know, 'talking' something mobiles seem not to do anything like as well. My dad is quite elderly - well I am nearly 60 so that figures, and neither of us have the sharpness of hearing to decode the heavily compressed voice and random vocoder artifacts. A landline however, even with IP carrying the digitised voice in the background, is far superior, so that is how we call most evenings.
And there are plenty of places without mains, that currently have a wired phone. I am a scout leader and I have been to a number of more remote campsites and mountain huts etc that have a phone but no power, which could never be easily converted to fibre. Of course such things are not cost effective and there is no requirement for a fibre network to work in the same 'pick up press 1 button and talk' kind of way. Adding "bring fuel and start genset" to the 'how to make a call' process is quite a protocol overhead.
.
They missed a trick when writing the fibre standards - it should have had a much lower power voice-only mode to fall back to, the sort of thing that needs only a couple of AA cells for a week of standby or a ten minute emergancy call. Could have been done by polling for incoming calls for a few milliseconds every few seconds and being totally off the rest of the time,
Mike.
As a hearing aid user... the advantages of having voice sent directly to/from my hearing aids is a game changer.
So long as I have reasonable reception the audio quality is fine, at least when talking to a person.
Occasionally I come across a call centre whose particular compression at their end, combined with the compression across the network and the recoding to bluetooth created something with "music" about 20% of the time and white noise (at 0dBFS) the rest of the time - that's just painful.
Since they become VoIP anyway at the exchange, that's not the reason. But those PSTN-VoIP gateways are probably old now, just like ADSL DSLAMs, and replacing them is expensive. Meanwhile copper lines too are old and deteriorating, and their maintenance expensive, especially the large primary cables with hundreds of pairs. Since they are replaced, or being replaced by fibre lines switching to VoIP is the only alternative, since they can't be used for PSTN.
It is true the simplicity of PSTN makes it very robust - but VoIP and mobile systems can be made more robut too - at a price, of course.
Storms take down analogue copper lines in the same way as they take down fibre optic lines. And if (as it appears) a large trunk was taken down, why do you think it would be any quicker to replace thousands of copper lines rather than a few fibre optics?
And of course, it's much cheaper - you don't need an individual cable for each phoneline to the exchange, and the equipment at the exchange to deal with all these wires.
Instead of a one-to-one, the fibre connections can be distributed in a similar way water can - big pipes feeding a bunch of smaller pipes, which feed a bunch of smaller pipes etc.
My mum was converted to fibre. Her only "internet" use is the alexa devices. Her router has a battery backup, and a socket for her old phones (the line and extension that previously plugged into the bt analogue master socket were simply moved to the router socket.)
There has been no functional difference. The signal is much clearer though.
The phone service is from the same ISP that provides the internet, so it's not through some 3rd party SIP provider "on the internet", and there's no reason why it can't be at least as reliable - if not more so - than the old analogue lines.
Almost 50 years ago, as part of my British Telecom Apprenticeship, I spent most of my first year with outside teams maintaining the copper network.
Most of the main trunk copper cables carried several hundred copper pairs and were pressurised (from the main exchange to help prevent water ingress) to a street cabinet (PCP or Primary Cross Connection Point) from there onwards a customers copper pair was carried over smaller grease filled copper cables via other street cabinets to the customers premises. Both types of cables would have underground joints (pressurised & grease filled) accessible via cable chambers in the footpath or carriageway.
Any water ingress, over time, started a chemical reaction with the water, electricity, copper conductors and crimps used to connect the copper pairs together. This usually resulted in a big bloom of chemical goo causing circuits to be degraded or to stop working.
An engineer needed to locate the faulty joint, using a combination of test equipment, cable spec charts and cable street plans. Once located the joint then needed to be opened (older lead/epoxy joints had to be cut/smashed), all copper pairs joints cut, cleaned & remade, then the joint resealed. These faults escalated in very wet weather which we get a lot of in the UK.
The other issue with copper, where there’s two pieces of very long copper separated by an insulator, is capacitance, to offset this we had to manually add inductance coils at the telephone exchanges, and if we needed to boost the signal we needed to manually wire in & setup amplifiers for individual circuits.
Also if a customer copper circuit needed to be rerouted because of a cable fault then this needed to be done by engineers in the field, at one or more cross-connection points, as well as engineers in the telephone exchange in the case of a trunk cable fault.
All very time consuming and expensive.
I left British Telecom in the late 80’s so my view is probably (hopefully) way out of date, but I have spent the last 40 years working in Telecoms/IT in the energy sector and fibre/IP* is the way forward, both for resilience, service monitoring and fault rectification. We've been aware of BT21CN and the impending end of analogue lines for at least 20 years, we migrated away from BT/Openreach copper for all our analogue lines many years ago.
*We have our own fibre/IP network and only use BT/Openreach as a last resort.
Copper has done it’s job, but it’s had it day, technology is moving on. Sorry.
Looks at Ubiquity Wi-Fi access point. There are some things that Coper is still good for. Glass / plastic is an insulator PoE needs metal.
Does the router power the Media Converter? No.
Does the router have a battery backup? No.
Is there a domestic UPS that could monitor battery state and supply power to two physical locations? Yes but it costs £1000s.
(I have a CPAP machine the first thing you know when the UPS battery fails is you cant breath considering a 10kWh home battery)
What is really irritating is the lack of an online service checker. So with all the delays there is no easy way to know when a service is due to be turned off; so a challenge I currently have is quickly determining when a client is going to lose their existing phone and security/fire alarm connections, as they typically will have received a letter which because it didn’t require immmediate action ie. it wasn’t an invoice to be paid etc. was consigned to “look at later” pile that periodically gets binned.
That has slightly more information than https://telephone-exchange.co.uk/
For example, It tells me my local exchange is due for closure.
It seems, at this late date, rather than provide any granular detail, BT are just providing a switch off date for all exchanges.
I have two clients who won’t be happy to be told they need to start the upgrade phones and alarms in the next couple of months, to be sure they won’t be impacted (ie. You are going to have to spend some money).
Anything that requires bulk energy is being forced onto electricity.. Gas for heating & cooking is being decomissioned, petroleum for transportation (or heating) is being decomissioned, coal has *been* decomissioned, even wood-burning stoves are being banned.
All telecoms is being forced to go via the Internet, which itself relies on a functioning electricity grid.. Cash is being phased out too, all purchases increasingly require the Internet.
The old telephone exchanges had their own source of power, and independently supplied it to the telephone in your house, so your phone would work during a power outage. Not so anymore.
Frankly, it feels as if the Invisible Hand are preparing us for something Cataclysmic. The "Powers That Be" couldn't be this stupid by accident.
...
where did I put my sandwich board..
>” where did I put my sandwich board..”
Better brush up on those flipchart, whiteboard and post-it note skills…
Obviously, showcasing your mastery of the whiteboard by being able to remove permanent marker from it with a dry marker and a kitchen towel…
We had a glimpse of this a couple of months ago in Orkney. Some windfarm over the water in Caithness futzed out local power loops and this cascaded to the entirety of Orkney for over 2 hours.
Immediately, all home BT phones running via a BT broadband box went offline - no power in the home to run them. After about 15 minutes, -all- mobile service vanished too. Not just “Emergency calls only”, but a total loss, for every network, as the masts’ uninterruptible power supplies got interrupted. No voice, no data, no 999.
It’s made me consider setting up a meshtastic grid…. so at least folk can reach neighbours , and perhaps emergency services.
>” It’s made me consider setting up a meshtastic grid….”
Interesting.. https://www.landmobile.co.uk/ seems to have no reference to meshtastic networking…
First thoughts were to look at dPMR446 unlicensed with a view to upgrading to licensed (0.5w to 5w radio), as handsets are readily obtainable and have decent battery life. Obviously, with this solution, neighbours (ie. People) actively form the network routing to daisy chain messages.
However, having done a quick look at meshtastic.org and pole1.co.uk (*), it does look interesting; my only real concern (give your environment) is the batteries needed (over and above a PMR-based solution).
So my suggestion would be for you to set up a meshtastic node, get on the map and see who pops up around you…
Alternatively, go the low tech route and set up a semaphore system …
(*) My surprise, is Paul of Pole1 probably worked with my late father.
Here in Deepest South Flkori-duh, Always Totally Terrible. used to, I repeat, USED TO, supply a UPS to home/small business 'service points' which had their DSL service, and the 'landlines' supplied were VoIP. They no longer do this. I personally have provided a UPS to those 'service points' I am responsible for. As the only load on the UPS would be the router, the phone, and, where necessary, whatever is doing the work of a switchboard, the UPS can usually hold out for quite some time. We get power from FPL; Frequent Power Loss blinks the lights quite often, but outages aren't typically long (except when there's a hurricane, of course), so the UPS is enough. The cell sites have UPSes and might have generators; they typically can stay up for an extended period.
Light a fire under those responsible for comms; cell towers around here got extended life UPSes and generators after several hurricanes. did naughty things, and the populace got pissed off. It's a bad idea to annoy Florida Man.
Light a fire under those responsible for comms; cell towers around here got extended life UPSes and generators after several hurricanes
Round here (UK), the most that's likely to happen is a lot of people complaining on twitface or whatever. But since everyone is preoccupied with "how cheap can I get it", don't expect the networks to spend money on meaningful battery backup that might never be used.
This report should be required reading for anyone with even the remotest responsibility for providing services - or interest in their own resilience. I would challenge anyone to read it and not find something they hadn't thought of that requires electricity and is essential or very important to basic living.
I appreciate that they're meant humorously, but the forced use of "funny" nicknames here just makes this confusing and hard to follow. Far more so those of us who aren't even US residents- let alone living in "South Flkori-duh" (South Florida?)- where it's not necessarily even obvious a joke is being made about a company we're barely aware of, if at all.
I mean, I assume, "Always Totally Terrible" is AT&T? (I've heard of them, at least).
"Frequent Power Loss"? What "frequent power loss" is he rambling about?.... Oh, hang on, it's capitalised, so I assuming it's another parody? But I still had to look up "FPL" to find out it most likely stood for "Florida Power and Light", who I assume are your local power company?
(I suspect that a large chunk of US residents outside Florida won't have heard of them either, let alone anyone in the UK, where the original story and many of its respondents are based.)
showcasing your mastery of the whiteboard by being able to remove permanent marker from it with a dry marker and a kitchen towel
Don't forget boys and girls, replacing office meeting rooms' dry-wipe markers with permanent markers is a great jape that will be enjoyed by everybody. But don't waste your money replacing all the pens, one in each meeting room will do.
Main exchanges had lead-acid batteries that could last for many hours, and a generator to take over when required. With the move to digital exchanges and outlying concentrators the battery life was much less, but in general long enough to take a generator on-site and connect it.
The problem with fibre setups is that powered street cabinets are everywhere. BT ones rarely have more than an hour or two battery life, others (like Virgin) have no battery backup at all. Since the mobile network often uses the same fibres for backhaul, once the outlying node batteries die nothing works. Only PSTN lines on main exchanges still operate.
FTTH Passive Optical Networks (PON) don't require power in street cabinets - they host only optical splitters. Only the exchange OLT and customers' ONT required to be powered, and they can be many kiolomteres apart.
FTTC requires powered cabinets because the VDSL ONU is there. So you can have still UPSes and generators where the OLTs are - but now customers require UPS or generators (solar power is OK too, if there is enough light...) to power their ONTs.
Mobile towers require power to drive the antennas' transceivers - that requires more power than fibre transceivers.
On the other hand fibre is not susceptible to electrical shorts like copper lines in some situations. It is susceptible to dirt into the connectors, though.
Don't know about the architecture in UK, here in PON lines connectors are installed in street cabinets where the optical splitters are also installed - to ease moving customers betwween "passive" providers (those installing their own OLTs at exchanges). since they need to be attested on their own splitters, and at "building terminals" - where the milti-fibre cables (usually 4/8 fibres per cable here) separates to reach the end customers with single-fibre cables. Everything between is usually fusion-spliced to ensure lower attenuation and better robustness. If a single entity delivers fibre, the splitter connection can be fusion spliced as well.
Still connectors have no metallilc parts and can't be corroded - than plastic may broke with time if low quality, that's true. Anyway today many xDSL line speeds suffer from copper line in bad conditions, - especially where cheaper cables were used and conditions are harshier - and interferences among pairs can't be reduced but using more expensive and power hungrier "vectoring" ONUs (and "modems").
Over here we tend to have one, or more, networks.
Openretch networks mostly have few pluggable connections which will be rarely (if ever) disturbed. At the exchange there'll be a connector to the central concentrator. Form there, I believe it's fusion splices all the way to the top of the pole (or into the manhole) where there's another connector into the splitter. Then the plugged connection for the subscriber fibre, and the plugged connection into the ONT. None of these will routinely be touched - switching between providers who use Openretch infrastructure is done in software.
Other networks are much the same, except they tend to have some large street cabinets instead of re-purposing the old exchange buildings.
It's been interesting watching them put the two networks in where I live - we have Openretch and Fibrus. Several times I've seen a tech sat on a stool by a manhole, gently corralling a veritable mare's tail of fibres, fusion splicing them, and carefully tucking them into the holders.
Passive Fibre networks like those being used today are just that passive, the laser that lights the optic (OLT) can be 12 miles away from.your ONT the splitters that carry the light to your home are passive and do not use electricity.
If you're worried about power loss just put the ONT and your router on a UPS.
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Of course, it's a giant conspiracy by a cartel of UPS and generator manufacturers, it's obvious when you look at it.
Though seriously you do raise a valid point about PSTN having an independent power supply but during my last power outage I still had a signal on my fibre so the fibre distribution cabinet must have an independent power supply too. (Assuming the gear in there uses power, I suppose it could all be optical but I doubt it) I've no idea if that's piped in or if there's a UPS in the cabinets. One can hope the proposed sets for vulnerable people will have some form of battery for use if mains power is lost.
The "Powers That Be" couldn't be this stupid by accident
Oh yes they could :(
You underestimate the ability of government (with < 5 years to election) and businesses (looking at next 1 or 2 quarter's profits) to kick the can down the road on anything that needs money spent but does not provide Shiny! to the electorate/customers to get brownie points.
> This year so far I have experienced 3 power cuts lasting for hours each. In London.
"This year" meaning 2026? Is this typical in the UK?
I ask because I've wondered lately about frequency of power outages in other developed countries, compared to the U.S. There are tens of thousands of people in the southeastern U.S. who were without power for days or weeks very recently, as a result of an ice storm. Personally, I'm in the northeast U.S., and we (myself and a few dozen neighbors) had a 14-hour outage a few weeks ago when a windstorm blew a tree down onto a power line. I have a gasoline-powered generator and a transfer switch that I can use to run my furnace from the generator instead of grid power. I'm forced to use it maybe once every 5 years. That's infrequent enough that most people here don't have generators or transfer switches.
As a kid in South Wales, we used to have regular power outages, as the cable crossed a large valley, and got snagged in trees during big storms. They fixed that route about 30 years ago, and i don't think there's been a powercut since (my mum still lives there - the family home)
Where I am, there has been one power cut in the time I've been there (10 years) - it was for 2 hours, and was because a substation blew up! I wasn't home at the time anyway, so I was ok!
Perhaps if they actually delivered the next generation service, so that, well, customers could actually order the new services, then their uptake may be a bit higher.
For me, fibre has been promised for over a year and the status tracker shows that its being delivered in our area, yet oddly, we never see anyone with a van, nor any of the manholes up, or people up the poles. The only sign of life was that someone that could operate a hammer, nailed a sign onto the pole saying that there is overhead fibre, when in fact there is nothing new on the pole as the trees are still right around the pole and there is zero sign of anything modern at the top of it.
I'm also wondering what happens when they threaten to turn off POTS, realise that not that many people actually care about the old telephone network as everyone that can, has already moved to mobile devices. The good news will be that there will be less calls fraudulent / scamming calls
"The good news will be that there will be less calls fraudulent / scamming calls"
How so?
Since being switched to 'Digital Voice', I have seen no reduction in the number of spurious callers to may landline number. The number hasn't changed, only the medium for delivering the calls, so not a great surprise to me.
Actually wtih VoIP it was easier to install a VoIP PBX at my home and intercept and divert unwelcomed calls. Moreover I can do concurrent calls, give alarm lines priority, and other nice stuff. I don't live tethered to my mobile, so I have VoIP phones aroun the house, they also double as an intercom.
"....not that many people actually care about the old telephone network as everyone that can, has already moved to mobile devices."
LOL, I will always laugh at these 'fanatics' that insist that mobiles are the best thing ever.
Mobile networks fairly regularly experience outages, some more than others, not forgetting signal issues in some areas too.
I also have a VoIP line, which I get more scamming calls on it than I do my landline!
Just to clarify...it is only the old PSTN being turned off in January. The modern digital phone services will run quite happily over a copper-based broadband connection and do not necessary require Full Fibre. Openreach are very keen to encourage both changes at the same time, however, and if you live in a fibre priority exchange area you won't be able to get a new copper service.
The modern digital phone services will run quite happily over a copper-based broadband connection provided (A) that the subscriber has UPS, otherwise they have nothing to talk to and (B) the VSLAM remains powered. I have no confidence in (B) being the case locally as it has failed to provide broadband in such a situation.
POTS will also fail in a power cut if the subscriber relies only on DECT which is why I also have a POTS handset - to report the power failure.
Thank you for that. I came here to comment on the misleading statement in the article:
BT Group's infrastructure arm is switching to an all-digital, IP-based service over fiber.
That sentence should not mention fibre (not even if spelt correctly). El Reg ought to know better. That kind of careless reporting can cause people to worry unnecessarily. We can already see people posting moans about how they don't yet have fibre.
This warning of BT has nothing to do with fibre. It's going to be a long time yet before a widespread switch off of copper services and it won't happen until all customers have been moved over to a fibre alternative.
My ISP (ICUK/CIX) has told me about this but, whilst I have nothing but praise for that company, I am livid with OpenReach, for two reasons:
(1) If I do as they want, ie end my POTS/ADSL service, they will charge me a "cease" fee, as if I were the one in breach of contract. If I don't do it, they will breach the contact.
Oftel should ban such random demands. But OpenReach is an unaccountable private monopoly.
(2) I am less than 500m from the exchange, to which I have a perfectly good copper wire that has never had any trouble.
My previous house, on the other hand, was 5km from the exchange and served by a crummy old wire that had faults at least three times.
What is OpenReach doing to replace these ancient cables? Why can't I continue having my Internet service over the copper wire that is perfectly good enough?
Since customers are not allowed to challenge OpenReach about this, please would UK Reg staff do so.
What is open reach doing with copper cables? Collecting them and returning the slightly scarce semi-precious metal to the pool for reuse.
And recovering money thus.
The power grid is becoming more granular, which is good, in due course power cuts might not take out so much.
"The power grid is becoming more granular, which is good, in due course power cuts might not take out so much."
I wish I could share your optimism. More granular probably means less redundant so although they may (with luck) not take out as much, they'll probably be more frequent.
Yeah, but...
My power company has always relied on customers phoning in to complain about power outages before coming out to fix them. And they require at least two different calls before they take it seriously. I have gone up and down my street in the night to try to convince neighbors to call, after I have made my own call.
Lately, it's hard to find anyone who can make a call when the power is out - even their "landline" phones are wireless and the base station dies without power.
I finally took to carrying my old, plain vanilla phone around to assist them in calling out.
But now I have a battery-backed solar power system, and the last time the power went out, I didn't notice until I got a txt from the power company saying power had been restored...
Here in my small town in the backwoods of the backwoods of Canada, we have had fibre to the home for years and years now. We have also had "smart" electricity meters so that nobody needs to call anobody about a power outage. BUT: there are also many places where ancient *TELEGRAPH* lines still stand many decades after last being used, a lot along railways, all in various stages of decay. I imagine it will be long after quantum entanglement instant galactic communications are standard that they will finally get around to collecting the last of the copper wires out there.
I imagine it will be long after quantum entanglement instant galactic communications are standard that they will finally get around to collecting the last of the copper wires out there.
He he, quite possibly. Around here the cables are in ducts in the ground, even up to the property. Yet when Openreach completed my connection they left the cables in the duct. I have read of some cases where they are removed, on one occasion the enterprising(?) engineer used the copper cable to pull the fibre cable back through to the chamber from the property. But if they can't even be bothered to pull five metres of copper wiring out of a duct when they are being paid for the job it suggests copper retrieval is not particularly lucrative.
Which is a little surprising. At first thought it does beg the question 'ah, but how do they remove the insulation?' but sometime last year I was watching a program about a scrap metal firm and they'd bought a machine that chopped cables up leaving them with a pile of small copper pellets and separated insulation. No significant manual labour required - just shovel the wiring into a feeder and catch the pellets at the end.
(humour sarcasm intended) Yeah but you have to take into consideration you live in a high population density small surface area country, not sparsely populated huge country like the UK. :-)
I live less than 400 meters from three residences on three different fibre exchanges and unless I pay a quoted fee of £108,000 I can not get broadband at my location. From one of those fibre provided locations there is already pole and conduit infrastructure in place where the old copper lines run. I shouldn't say I can't get, I can get broadband at an estimated speed of up to 1.5 mbit down and .3 mbit up if I want to sign up for "high speed" broadband on the existing copper. But hey, from a technology point of view we party like it's 1999....
s/random/ransom/
I was asking two separate questions about copper cables: (2a) why can't I keep using my modern one, that works absolutely fine and (2b) why don't they put their effort instead into replacing the ancient ones on telegraph poles that serve Victorian terraced houses?
why can't I keep using my modern one, that works absolutely fine
You can, and probably will, carry on doing so. The media have done a good job of getting this back to front - the copper is staying for now and it'll probably be many decades before everything is fibre. What is changing is the equipment on either end, the same copper line will now carry a digital signal rather than an analogue POTS one.
They'll replace the copper at some point in the future as part of a local refresh but the equipment in the exchange is being updated over a much shorter timescale. Putting everyone on digital simplifies the equipment there and potentially allows greater speed over those same lines in the medium term, as backwards compatibility with POTS equipment and signalling does not need to be considered.
(1) If I do as they want, ie end my POTS/ADSL service, they will charge me a "cease" fee, as if I were the one in breach of contract. If I don't do it, they will breach the contact.
If you choose to terminate your POTS/ADSL service early then you will have to pay a cease fee. It's not a breach of contract but it is your choice not to continue for the full term and your provider has a right to compensation.
But who is wanting to end your POTS/ADSL service? BT don't. BT will continue to provide whatever services they can over whatever cabling is available to your property. This article is talking only about the voice service and BT (or whoever your current provider is) will just help you move over to a VoIP solution. This will work fine over ADSL.
What is OpenReach doing to replace these ancient cables?
They are replacing them with fibre. Currently 85% of the country is covered, more is being added at rapid pace. However that process is not what this article is about.
Why can't I continue having my Internet service over the copper wire that is perfectly good enough?
You can. At least for now, likely for several more years, even if/when you have fibre available. There will eventually come a time when BT will force you to switch to fibre (at no cost to you) but for now they have only vague plans as to how that will happen and it depends on the fibre availability at your exchange.
The bottom line here is that you should stop panicking. You don't have to do anything other than work with your Communication Provider to get your voice service switched over to VoIP. It won't cost you a penny.
Two things.
1) You should not be talking to Openreach. That contract belongs to your licenced operator, e.g. BT, EE, Virgin, Sky, whoever.
2) if you are 500m from the exchange you will be on an exchange only (EO) copper line. When Openreach decommission your local exchange equipment you will HAVE to migrate to another form of connection (I'd suggest FTTP as FTTC isn't available for EO lines). If you don't your connection will be terminated.
You need to talk to whoever you pay for your copper line, they need to sort it out, not you.
...who "rely" on the building owner (who is that?) to give permission to *any* willing company to fibre up 16+ apartments.
We have ADSL only as leaseholder cannot be bothered to allow us fibre despite 500m in each direction being connected.
Our leverage? Nil
Recourse to? Leaseowner
Appeals to? See above
Evidently we have "full fibre" and (allegedly) a slight increase in speed over the previous copper based system, but the last 20m of cable to our router connection is still copper and hasn't been replaced!
We have been given a new router (from EE) into which we have had to plug our landline.
SWMBO works with older people many of whom prefer to use landlines for phone communication hence retaining our landline phone.
We still have no date for getting our proper "full fibre" connection.
That post sounds like you are confused (as so many are).
Evidently we have "full fibre" and (allegedly) a slight increase in speed over the previous copper based system
That's a strange comment. A full fibre solution will offer speeds way in excess of anything you are going to get over copper. Speeds in excess of 2Gb/s are available from some providers and that's just the starting point.
but the last 20m of cable to our router connection is still copper and hasn't been replaced!
Well then that's not a 'full fibre' connection.
We have been given a new router (from EE) into which we have had to plug our landline.
Ah perhaps that's the cause of your confusion. As several of us have now pointed out that has nothing to do with your cable type. As far as this article is concerned you are now 'done all that'.
SWMBO works with older people many of whom prefer to use landlines for phone communication hence retaining our landline phone.
I'm not sure why you feel the need to retain a landline just because you communicate with other people who rely on one. Mobile phones can make and receive calls to/from landlines just fine. In any case you have successfully retained your 'landline' by plugging your phone into your router. Job's a good un'.
We still have no date for getting our proper "full fibre" connection.
Yeah that can be annoying. Unfortunately companies have learnt that if you give out dates people get annoyed when the schedule inevitably slips due to the complexity of what they are trying to do. So given that they get about the same amount of flack whether they give out dates or not they made the sensible choice of not giving out dates because at least that saves them some work.
>” That's a strange comment. A full fibre solution will offer speeds way in excess of anything you are going to get over copper. ”
Depends..
EE’s entry level full fibre (FTTP) is 100/20. If the subscriber previously had 80/20 FTTC then they would only see a small speed improvement. Even with the 40/10 FTTC offering, if you aren’t doing very much other than casual web browsing and email the speed improvement will be hardly noticeable.
In our case the fibre line ends 100 meters from the house. Openreach have made two ineffectual attempts to gain permission to dig down the unadopted road and given up. Our provider (Sky) was embarrassed enough to give us compensation. I've asked the relevant neighbour and he has not been contacted.
I cannot believe Openreach will meet their deadline.
I had similar issues with OpenReach connecting fibre from the pavement to my house. 3rd time around, the two chaps finally found where the junction was and were able to dig to it and free the cables within it. It turns out they are obliged to give compensation, so I will only have to pay for 1 month of my 18 month minimum contract period.
I cannot believe Openreach will meet their deadline.
They have met their deadline where your property is concerned. Like all telecommunications providers their claim is 'number of properties passed' by which they mean 'number of properties that can place an order to be connected'. The project is big and expensive enough as it is without potentially wasting resources wiring up properties whose owners might never choose to take up the service.
What all CPs do is roll out street-level fibre and prepare it so that connections can be made as and when property owners ask for it. If owners don't ask or if some aspect of the property prevents that connection being made then its irrelevant to the plan.
I would also question your use of the word 'ineffectual'. In almost all cases the problem lies with the property owner. BT are constrained to operate within the law and if they don't get a satisfactory response (or as often happens they get no response at all) their hands are tied. As I pointed out in another post the government is currently trying to modify the legislation to help BT get past these issues but for now your attempt to blame BT is most likely unfair.
"Or as often happens they get no response at all"
Kind of difficult for them to get a response if they haven't made contact in the first place
Openreach management is unfit for purpose. I've been waiting for fibre to show up here and the techs were running it in the street a year ago.
It turns out that the entire street had been "available for order" for a year - except for a block of 14 addresses in the middle, spread across 2 postcodes.
It took over a YEAR of repeated queries to Openreach that kept getting the same "We're rolling out in your area and will let you know when it's ready for order" response (despite BTOR and Morrisns contracting staff on the ground confirming that the fibre was present and available)
When the 7 pair drop from my house to the street pit went faulty I had to endure the contractoirs playing musical chairs with "least faulty pair" shifts for 3 years before Openreach actually admitted the drop was faulty and 2 more years before they actually fixed it despite repeated statements that it would be repaired within 6 weeks.
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the PHONE COMPANY"
This is exactly why New Zealand forced their version of BT/Openreach to be fuly cleaved into 2 separate companies with separate ownership of outside and inside plant.
I've just had my 40yo line upgraded to digital voice and it only took just over a year!
Unknown to me, BT kept ordering it but the jobs were being cancelled by OR. Eventually they managed to cut off all phone service (no i/c or o/g calls) that took a week to report and fix. After another couple of months they finally contacted me to say the reason the repeat orders were failing was because OR couldn't find my address on the Royal Mail database (they listed floors rather than flats). "You need to get the address updated on RM".. huh! It's a 40yo phone service!
Tried RM's 'change address' service but after nothing for 3 months they finally said I needed to get the council to inform them of the 'change', so I shot back a screenshot from the council site... but no, that's not sufficient.
OR finally accepted my version of the address a couple of weeks back (when I also learned that the other flats had been accepted, despite also not appearing on the RM database) and the service was finally switched.
The only problem I found was that it comes with voicemail that I don't have the option to switch off (you can set the number of rings, but not 'off'), so I had to raise an order to cancel voicemail
Anyone who has experience of IT knows the costs associated with maintaining old and obsolete hardware. PSTN is old and obsolete. The number of companies willing and able to repair or sell new hardware for PSTN equipment is dwindling fast. Those that are still in that business will be charging correspondingly high amounts for the privilege.
My business is based in a small East Midlands town of 15,000 yet still no "Full Fibre" to our office. We're not difficult to access, we're mid-town on the edge of the A6 main road. We currently have a GFAST service running at about 300/50 mbps, being 50 metres from the street cabinet and 400 metres from the exchange. BT Openreach have been give UK Gov't money to rollout in the area yet still cannot give a date when they'll rollout full fibre. Now they're talking about turning off copper, which presumably includes GFAST.
Currently getting a BT Openreach engineer for problems on GFAST line problems is a bit of a problem, as GFAST engineers are an endangered species who don't carry that "modem" on their van.
I've last week had confirmation from BT Openreach that they have no rollout planned for 2026 or 2027. Sad to think that they were given a complete telephone network for the whole country and now only have plans for 80% of the population/businesses. They've even had tax payer money to upgrade their infrastructure, and those upgrades are not leased to BT, the ownership is handed over with nothing in return.
Now they're talking about turning off copper
Where is this? BT will not be turning off copper until all the lines on a given exchange have been replaced with fibre. Whilst there have been a couple of exchanges where this has happened they were basically test exchanges. BT does not currently have a formal program for the wide-spread removal of copper lines.
Or are you yet another person confusing the switch off of PSTN services in this article with the switch off of copper (something different).
For small business connections I’ve never directly approached Openreach.
For my East Midlands based SME customers, I’ve used Glide, in part because they are (or were) the sole provider to many local business parks but also because they are registered on the various government schemes (current scheme is the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme ) which can contribute to the initial fibre installation cost. Yes, for some of their connections they use Openreach, but they have Ofcom imposed SLAs on Openreach which enable them to queue jump BT/Openreach customers.
Zen internet switched me last week “fulfilling my order”. I never ordered it. When I queried it they said all lines have to be switched by 2027. Fair enough - but this it Feb 2026 and I need the line for another month. They said “just move your phone to the back of the router”. My router (supplied by Zen) has no phone socket. When asked, they knew this.
So, effectively, Zen cut off my phone line, knowing it couldn’t survive their self-imposed “upgrade”.
Thanks for nothing and our poor handling of the switch.
I am a business customer with a London postcode. I am on FTTC, but the last 200m is copper. I would love to have FTTP, and will happily pay. But BT don't offer it on my London exchange.
Come on OpenReach, extract digit, and complete the London fibre rollout!
Currently you pay for an OpenReach bit of copper with a telephone exchange on the end. You can then plug pretty much any phone of your choice into any socket in the house, Mickey Mouse, DECT base station, 1970's trim phone etc etc - you have a free choice. In most cases, you can even decide what modem you want to use if you need more feature than the FREE ISP provided model offers.
Come 2027, if you want a landline phone number, you'll find it only works on their router with their broadband - which is going back to the early days of mobile phones when you had to have the handset from the mobile carrier as it only worked with their SIM.
Currently people who run their own router, for gaming, working from home, or perhaps running a home business, will be forced to switch to feature dead BT HomeHub2 if they want a landline. BT will not support VoIP via a 3rd party device. If they provided the SIP credentials to home users, then they would likely buy a VoIP phone of their choice from Amazon and switch straight away, but BT are using the copper switch off as an excuse to sell you into a new Monopoly. To make matters worse, if you port your number from BT to another more flexible (and cheaper!) VoIP provider, they cut off your broadband in the process - all designed to make you stay. My advice is to go with a 3rd party Fibre provider, buy a VoIP handset, and then port your number away from BT as soon as possible.
In the digital age, your landline number is no different to a mobile number of domain name, you have the right to move it to another company - so exercise that right, make life easier, save a few quid, and show BT you're not impressed with their "migration".
I think BT’s approach retains the geographic location feature of a fixed line.
BT by controlling the router and serialising it to a specific line, means they know to use that telephone number and line someone has to be at your address.
Obviously, this may not be important to you, but I’m sure there are some use cases where this might be useful.
its about time we stopped stalling and holding out for these dinosaurs - its a phone - its not hard to use (cognitive diseases aside).
if they cant use (more like they refuse) then they lose out. adapt or die, and as an aside, i have taught elder tech skills as part of BBC / govt initiatives, and when it clicks they have the greatest sense of self achievement.
so we should help them and not listen to them when they scream "no i'm not learning that new fangled thingymabob at my age".
anyone the lower end of say 60 should have "some" tech skills - after all they programmed VCR's, used CB radios etc back in the day.
i for one will be glad in say 20-30 years when these people go the way of the dinosaurs.
There really isn't anything to learn - using a phone with 'Digital Voice' is exactly the same as they always have been with the prior system. The holdouts referred to by the original article are principally businesses (and some otf them quite large ones at that.
It isn't simply a case of old people refusing to change.
