How the landline phone will die – Guide

The Phone Exchange is a small, unremarkable building in the heart of the city. But inside, the walls are lined with rows of small plastic blocks. These blocks are used to create a network of communication between homes and businesses in the city. The cables go in connection homes and businesses for the network, and connect everyone to the rest of the world.

The Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is a system of copper cables that connect any landline to an extensive mesh of wires, undersea cables and satellites, cabinets and street poles. In three years, most of those lines will be muted. ..

Openreach engineers are working to replace Britain’s copper telephone network and end the landline forever. Your deadline? December 31, 2025. From that moment, landlines to any home or businesses in Great Britain will only continue to function if they are hooked up to the internet.

“Copper net is still the bread and butter of the UK now,” says James Lilley, director of managed client migrations at Openreach. “But that served us well during the pandemic, we kept everyone connected in that network. Now, with the necessary hardware no longer being manufactured and the skills needed to maintain it no longer being taught, the copper network is running out of time.” ..

Many landline domain phone numbers will be in disuse, forgotten. Older devices will no longer function if they cannot connect to digital exchanges. Some phones will no longer use tone dialing, the musical sound that since the 1960s accompanied pressing keys to press a phone number.

Across the UK, Openreach is in the process of transitioning from copper to fiber optic cables. This change is meant to make the network more cost-effective in the long run, and Openreach has already exchanged more than 5.5 million cables. To complete this transition, engineers need to go to each switch and unhook the copper cables and replace them with fiber until they reach 75 percent coverage. Once they do, they trigger a ‘sell stop’, meaning that they stop selling products on the copper platform and direct people to an upgrade to FTTP. ..

This large tranche of switches is the first step in Openreach’s plan to upgrade its network. The company has been working on this for some time and it is important that everyone who needs to be upgraded or changed gets the update.

Engineers are struggling to keep up with the demand for phone service upgrades while still serving people using the old analog phone network. When a national stop-sell takes effect in September 2023, 14 million customers will be forced into the new system. ..

Salisbury was the first place in the UK to experience a complete switch to VoIP in 2020, and more than 95 percent of its 20,000 installations now use VoIP. The city’s switch to VoIP was a huge engineering challenge for OpenReach, which had to find a way to connect the city center without leaving unsightly cables near the iconic cathedral. ..

Instead of digging up the cathedral’s stone floor, the 60 engineers on site used new technology that would camouflage itself among historic architecture. They were the first in the world to use new super-small connector block terminals (CBTs) that discreetly connect fiber cables to people homes. The thin units, which are approximately the size of a mobile phone, are designed to connect eight installations at once, without the need to erect new posts. More than 200 were deployed throughout the city center, serving around 1,500 homes and business. Engineers also used ground penetration radar, which allowed them to see and map a clear route for new cables without any drilling; and retractable cables, for long areas of terraced houses and storefronts, to avoid excavation. ..

The city is planning to switch to a full-fibre network by 2022, in order to improve the quality of life for everyone. They went door to door, talking to people who didn’t have broadband and setting up, connecting your phones on your routers. By 2022, the entire city will have to switch to a full-fibre network.

During national blockades, when people were confined to their homes, there was a surge in mobile and fixed calls. The risk of overloading the network has led to industry calls for action to improve voice services to handle increased communications and disruptions such as dropped calls and outages. ..

The new system will mean that those who only want voice services will now have to buy broadband and use it through it. For many elderly and vulnerable people, landlines are a lifeline, especially if they don’t have internet or live in a rural area with poor connectivity.

A million people in the UK don’t have an Internet connection, and without support they could end up very confused. Joel Lewis, Policy Manager at Age UK, says that local efforts are needed to help these people make the transition. ..

The big danger in crossover is that devices that rely on analog phone connections to work – like care and safety systems – can stop working without anyone noticing. There are many high-end case systems that rely on the telephone network, which is widely considered to be more reliable than the network, to operate. Alarm buttons for assistance to elderly residents, emergency phones in elevators, the phones at railway crossings, building intercoms, traffic lights and highway signs are just a few of the systems that are in danger of being forgotten or forgotten. And you don’t want to forget about a traffic light.

The national stop-selling deadline is actually the easy part, says Lilley. It’s the peripheral things that use PSTN that can slow things down. “Much of the industry’s focus and collaboration revolves around ensuring these extreme cases are understood and moved in time,” says Lilley. I’m not so worried about the high volume of residential customers, I think everything will work fine,” says Lilley. If they miss the deadline, it will be because they can’t leave anyone or anything behind. ..

The market town of Mildenhall, in Suffolk, was next: the stop-sell was triggered on May 4th. It was chosen because it is typical of others in the UK in terms of geography and variety of communication providers offering services. The plan was slightly different from Salisbury’s – rather than migrating customers to fiber services, engineers would focus on migrating customers from legacy copper services to replacement copper services that will support the delivery of broadband telephony services. So far, the trial is going well.

Copper wires are outdated and can’t keep up with the demand for high-speed Internet. Fiber optic cables have more capacity than copper wires, but they’re expensive to install and maintain. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says that upgrading existing copper infrastructure is cheaper, but it’s faster than most households need for Internet connectivity – which surpassed 25 mbps at download in 2020 – means that copper is no longer adequate. ..

Work is long overdue. The UK is lagging behind the rest of the world in broadband connectivity, despite increasing its fiber connections by more than 50 percent in 2020. According to OECD data, Spain, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden are among the countries with the best connectivity, with more than 70 percent coverage. ..

The mix of different networks has created a peculiar technology mess in the UK, explains Dean Bubley, founder of technology consultancy Disruptive Wireless. Someone choosing up a receiver that is connected to a PSTN network and connected up for an exchange, it’s going through many different gateways, boxes, segways, and switches, which means your connection may be going in and out of the Internet multiple times by the time your voice reaches the other end. “Some of them will be IP and will translate back and forth from conventional telephony to IP at these gateway points,” says Bubley. “This is terribly inefficient and also adds sound deterioration.”

The legacy of copper network are thousands of phone numbers that are foisted on customers who are only interested in broadband and are not used. Since 2000, four million homes completely disconnected the landline, according to a survey by price comparison company Uswitch. Of the 80 percent of homes that still have a landline, a quarter (26 percent) do not have the phone connected to the wall. Thirty-five percent of people said the only reason they had a landline number was because they were required to have a broadband connection. People say they receive more calls from scammers on their landlines than from their loved ones.

Final note

The landline phone is about to die. In fact, it’s likely that by the end of this decade, most people will be using cell phones instead. But even though cell phones are more popular, they’re not always the best choice for long-distance calls. That’s because landlines still offer a lot of benefits over cell phones - like being able to call anyone in the world without having to worry about your signal or waiting on a long line. So if you’re considering whether or not to switch to a cell phone, it’s important to think about all of the reasons why you should keep your landline alive. Here are five reasons:

  1. Landlines are cheaper than cellphones: Cellphones can be expensive, especially if you need service from multiple providers. But if you only use one provider and don’t want to switch providers often, landlines can be a much cheaper option. For example, Verizon charges $30 per month for unlimited talk and text with their Landline service compared to $50 per month for an unlimited plan with a cell phone company like AT&T or Sprint.
  2. Landlines offer more features than cellphones: Cellphones come with many features that landlines don’t - like caller ID and voicemail. Landlines also have more options for calling outside of the United States than most cellphone companies do - like international calls and calls through cable TV companies. This means that you can call any country in the world without worrying about your signal or waiting on a long line!
  3. Landlines are better for older people: Cellphones can be very helpful for younger people who just started using them but may not be able to handle long-distance calls yet. But as people get older, they may no longer be able to handle long-distance calls as well - which is where landlines come in handy again! Older adults may not have as strong an internet connection or may not have other devices available that