Old phones and the new BT internet-only phonelines

[Dave Moll]

Unfortunately, it appears that I would have to subscribe to the Telegraph (which I'm not willing to do) to read more than the first sentence of that article.

[Dickie]

That's true, I don't subscribe either, bu the headline says it all, really.

[Chris R]

I learned today from BBC Scotland news that, following the problems caused by loss of power for fibre only subscribers and the inability to call emergency services (the mobile phones also out of action), BT are to pause the rollout of fibre only. This will be until a solution to the problem can be found.
I wonder what this will entail.

Chris R

[Dave Moll]

Originally Posted by Chris R

This will be until a solution to the problem can be found.
I wonder what this will entail.

That's why I was wondering whether there's more detail further down within the article - though probably not.

[Simon Gittins]

A few more details in the Mail:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-backlash.html

[Dave Moll]

And, thanks to a THG member, here is what the IET has to say.

[RichardGM]

Prompted by this thread I have been contemplating a UPS for my router (or for the new router that would come with a phone socket). Off-the-shelf 12 V UPSs seem to have limited capacity, so I've been working on a design for home-brew, though how much capacity one will actually need is a "how long is a piece of strong" question, when a power cut can last anything from a few seconds to a few days. My present Virgin cable router consumes about 600 mA at 12 V, so a 20 Ah battery would provide somewhat better than 24 hours.

[Tim]

I only heard about this on the Jeremy Vine show today, nothing in the way of briefings from Openreach or BT. Rather ironic when one works for a communications company.

[Pellseinydd]

Originally Posted by Tim

I only heard about this on the Jeremy Vine show today, nothing in the way of briefings from Openreach or BT. Rather ironic when one works for a communications company.

They'll never cover everything to have the phone 'line' working 24/7/365 no matter what.

I have had FTTC for an number of years. My landline went 'dis' (no dialtone) a few years ago. And I could hear NU tone on the line plus others trying to call/speak. Even managed to speak to one woman who had the same problem.
Rang BT on my mobile to report the problem - 99% a cable fault. Was told no it wasn't - it was a fault in the exchange by some-one in a distant land!

That was on a Friday evening Still heard nothing by the next Wednesday so rang again and they now agreed it was a cable fault and they were awaiting new cable lengths. The FTTC cabinet is just across the road from me. It has a 400 pair to the exchange some two miles away. Oddly, the copper pair which feeds my BT landline end up reaching the exchange by a different cable route to the fibre 'cable' - they only follow the same route for about 400 yards then they take different routes up to a mile apart to reach the exchange. Turned out that the paper insulated copper cable had a leaky joint halfway to the exchange in the next village. They needed to renew two lengths of cable and it took two weeks from ordering to arrive!

Meanwhile my FTTC broadband held up over one leg of the copper to the cabinet with a drop of speed and my 20+ VoIP PSTN lines and the nearly two hundred lines off my Asterisk PABX kept working serving as a hub on CNet!

Interesting that these articles only seem to mention power going off in rural areas due to trees falling on the lines due to the storms but never seem to mention that the same storm could well have knocked out overhead Openreach cable routes!

Ian
on a windswept hilltop hundreds of feet up in N.Wales!

[McMurdo]

There was a little thing about it on Radio 4 this afternoon, maybe You & Yours. They were interviewing some spokesman from BT or Openreach or some similar company. He said they had to move over to internet phones because they could not get spares for their 'System X' exchanges.

[Cobaltblue]

Originally Posted by McMurdo

There was a little thing about it on Radio 4 this afternoon, maybe You & Yours. They were interviewing some spokesman from BT or Openreach or some similar company. He said they had to move over to internet phones because they could not get spares for their 'System X' exchanges.

A lot of the system X equipment was designed and manufactured by Plessey at Poole.

After the GEC/Siemens takeover it became GEC Plessey Telecommunications (GPT) ( they took over the second floor of No 1 building ISTR ) manufacturing still carried out at Poole (possibly other places) but GPT went defunct in 1998.

It means that they have probably had no new equipment or spares for almost 25 years.

I cannot imagine there being much of a market for new traditional exchange equipment.

Cheers

Mike T

[Aub]

GPT became Marconi, not too long after I left GPT Coventry in 1996. Marconi continued on the same
site until the early "noughties", I believe, when it was taken over by Ericsson.

Kind of ironic that BT can't get spares for System X, when it was partly their fault that the company went bust, as they refused to give them even a small slice of the "Century 21", or whatever it was called.

Aub

[G6Tanuki]

Article in our local paper herer:

https://www.gazetteandherald.co.uk/n...hones-digital/

It's interesting though that a lot of us 'rural types' historically bought first/second-generation mobile phones to provide communication when the analog service was 'out' because fallen trees had taken the overhead lines down.

And now quite a lot of people who still have FTTC broadband have a router which incorporates a 4G SIM to provide automatic failover when the wired FTTC expired.


(In times-past I made a nice living running a VHF repeater and renting-out walkie-talkies/vehicle-mount radios [£1 per day +VAT!] to farmers,vets, contractors, forestry-types and equestrianists across Wiltshire/Oxfordshire)

[duncanlowe]

Originally Posted by Cobaltblue

A lot of the system X equipment was designed and manufactured by Plessey at Poole.

After the GEC/Siemens takeover it became GEC Plessey Telecommunications (GPT) ( they took over the second floor of No 1 building ISTR ) manufacturing still carried out at Poole (possibly other places) but GPT went defunct in 1998.


Mike T

Coventry was also heavily involved. A friend of mine was a manager there and seriously involved. He travelled extensively, including China in relation to that, and we even borrowed a small PABX version for an event in the local area. It was my job to run the cables and maintain the service on site. I used a batch of what seemed to be stainless field telephone cable (that I mentioned in another thread).

He even told me of a problem they had with an installation up in Scotland where a call box on an island kept losing connection to the exchange. It would last a couple of days, but by the time they got up there to investigate it had fixed itself. In the end they had to have someone 'camp out' up there. Someone parking a ship in the way of the radio link finally got diagnosed.

I know they were quite involved in the electronics. I still have some 'obsolete' EPROMS that he gave me back in the eighties.

[paulsherwin]

Originally Posted by McMurdo

There was a little thing about it on Radio 4 this afternoon, maybe You & Yours. They were interviewing some spokesman from BT or Openreach or some similar company. He said they had to move over to internet phones because they could not get spares for their 'System X' exchanges.

The media are finally picking up on this. There was a story on BBC South this lunchtime, spinning it as a local issue because somebody near Salisbury claimed they couldn't get a mobile signal.

The problem is that it costs Openreach a small fortune to maintain a parallel copper POTS service just so that a few people in rural Borsetshire can call an ambulance during a power cut. We all end up paying for it.

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by paulsherwin

The problem is that it costs Openreach a small fortune to maintain a parallel copper POTS service just so that a few people in rural Borsetshire can call an ambulance during a power cut. We all end up paying for it.

Eggs-actly- it's the whole 'long tail' issue - where you can end up forking-out vast amounts of money to support the last-few customers [who are often unprofitably low-spenders anyway] who want to continue using legacy services.

There really wasn't an outcry when 405-line TV closed down, dialup-Internet ceased to be a thing... or when BT stopped offering Telegrams, or when IRC/MSN/AOL Instant Messenger/Usenet News went under. Or when Radio Rentals/Rumbelows/Granada stopped renting-out tellies, or when BlockBuster stopped renting VHS tapes and then disappeared from the High Street.

There will always be a 'long tail'... and being obliged to support it indefinitely with no regards to costs is just plain stupid-economics.

[paulsherwin]

There is a genuine problem with the termination of POTS services for some people though, it's not just Luddite whinging. There's no obvious solution other than telling the people affected to suck it up, which won't go down well politically, especially given the demographic most affected.

[Oldcodger]

Originally Posted by duncanlowe

Coventry was also heavily involved. A friend of mine was a manager there and seriously involved. He travelled extensively, including China in relation to that, and we even borrowed a small PABX version for an event in the local area. It was my job to run the cables and maintain the service on site. I used a batch of what seemed to be stainless field telephone cable (that I mentioned in another thread).

He even told me of a problem they had with an installation up in Scotland where a call box on an island kept losing connection to the exchange. It would last a couple of days, but by the time they got up there to investigate it had fixed itself. In the end they had to have someone 'camp out' up there. Someone parking a ship in the way of the radio link finally got diagnosed.

I know they were quite involved in the electronics. I still have some 'obsolete' EPROMS that he gave me back in the eighties.

Duncan- another problem did come to light. The radio hut was located such that the aerial was below the tideline, and when tide came in, lighn of site was obscured by sea.

[ms660]

Originally Posted by paulsherwin

There is a genuine problem with the termination of POTS services for some people though, it's not just Luddite whinging. There's no obvious solution other than telling the people affected to suck it up, which won't go down well politically, especially given the demographic most affected.

Lawrence.

[Aub]

Originally Posted by duncanlowe

Coventry was also heavily involved. A friend of mine was a manager there and seriously involved. He travelled extensively, including China in relation to that, and we even borrowed a small PABX version for an event in the local area. It was my job to run the cables and maintain the service on site. I used a batch of what seemed to be stainless field telephone cable (that I mentioned in another thread).

He even told me of a problem they had with an installation up in Scotland where a call box on an island kept losing connection to the exchange. It would last a couple of days, but by the time they got up there to investigate it had fixed itself. In the end they had to have someone 'camp out' up there. Someone parking a ship in the way of the radio link finally got diagnosed.

I know they were quite involved in the electronics. I still have some 'obsolete' EPROMS that he gave me back in the eighties.

Yes, Coventry certainly was involved. The original Post Office contract was split three ways. Plessey did the switching matrix, GEC ( Coventry) did the processor and STC did the signalling. I spent the last few months of my apprenticeship in the development area in Coventry in 1975. I left GEC in 1979. The processor, by then, was known as POPUS ( Post Office Processor Utility System ) which didn't work properly. Later that year, an American company were brought in to make it work. Can't remember who they were, but some of the young graduates from Coventry went to California and never came back!

Interesting days

Cheers

Aub