The biggest problems is power. The phone company power the POTS line — you can even make an emergency call from an abandoned building with no electrical service (and no phone subscription) if you find a jack and plug in. Under those huge central office buildings are huge banks of -48 V batteries which are required to provide a week of power (or was it two in the US? I can’t remember).
Now you’ll have a router with a battery that the owner doesn’t know about and won’t service, so that within a year or so it won’t work. In an emergency: no phone service.
This assumes that anyone has maintained the 48V infrastructure, which doesn’t seem like something that will be feasible considering the insignificant quantity of customers using true copper landline service.
The other problem with customers preferring not to have landlines is that by the time they need them, it’s too late to convince them to buy a traditional telephone and plug it in. You are likely to be nursing home age if you still prefer having a landline. You can have amazing infrastructure but if nobody uses it, it’s useless.
What we really have now is cellular sites with their own infrastructure aiming to keep them operational during power outages.
Then we’ve also got various satellite services that are growing in capabilities day by day, and are built in to common devices like iPhones as an SOS method.
I’m not in the UK but my house was built relatively recently and it doesn’t have any telephone jacks. The theoretical benefits of a landline are entirely theoretical. The ship has thoroughly sailed.
> Now you’ll have a router with a battery that the owner doesn’t know about and won’t service
In Canada, Bell has actually discontinued battery backup in their latest modems, supposedly because they were having trouble with modems not rebooting correctly.
There's some sense in which I prefer this, though, because at least I know how to source D batteries and they're a commonly available standard and I know exactly what their shelf life is. I might even have spares around in my emergency kit for things like lanterns and radios. I've also seen Verizon battery backup units that run on small lead-acid batteries which seem to need frequent replacing, and require me to look up the details and order from a specialty vendor every time... more annoying to keep extras of those on hand and tough luck if it reaches end of life shortly before or during an emergency.
I think a solution to this is mandate providers provide a cellular interface for households for emergency response, with battery backup. Basically a mobile hotspot with a phone jack, speaker, microphone, and red button to call for help attached to a chonky batter pack. Device inventory and health is required to be reported to regulators.
This solves for power, and reporting means it’s trivial to log and audit if the devices are online and available for emergency service calls.
If a mobile tower isn’t available in the area, a tower must be made available for the sector coverage.
Anything else in a world of fiber to the home is compliance theater, as your example shows.
How many people still have a corded phone, and how many of those would remember that those phones still work when there's no power?
It's much more important to ensure that the cell network is resilient. Backup power, mobile towers that can be deployed to disaster areas, and continuing the rollout of satellite connectivity will help far more people than maintaining landline infrastructure.
You wont have a battery. In the UK they stopped providing a battery backup when they switched to the newer ONT quite a while ago, and routers typically do not include one either.
There are a few generic router battery backup products on the market but none specifically get advertised as working on the ONT, but many do. Realistically though they're utterly pointless when you can pick up a vastly superior APC UPS for the same price.
An interesting component of the switching off of POTS is that the quality of service requirements are different. POTS is regulated to require the phone company to maintain a certain legal quality of service with negative consequences for failing to do so.
Meanwhile, cell phone and VOIP services are "best effort."
The phone company put a pretty huge amount of effort into maintaining QoS (Lily Tomlin jokes aside) because there were consequences for not doing so. It makes sense that they would prefer to shed that responsibility.
In some places of Europe, the internet ADSL technology on the copper wires, the same as used for PSTN phones, delivers higher speed (realistically an order of few Mbps) compared to congested LTE/4G mobile networks (typical 1-3 Mbps). The mobile network providers don't guarantee minumim speeds in the contracts, and customers (typically older people) that move from ADSL to LTE/4G, are left with a degraded service without a possibility to object.
“Best efforts” is a legal term. Its definition can vary from state to state, but it is not just, “oh we tried, sorry, lol” and it defines the highest standard of implementation in all jurisdictions.
> … public awareness seems low that analog phone services will soon be disconnected.
What’s the level of public awareness that they’re even using the landline service? My 98yo grandmother has had the “same” phone service (with the same phone number) for decades. She’s completely unaware of the infrastructure it runs on.
I happen to know that her area was converted to all fiber digital years ago, but she wouldn’t know that. Her children (my parents’ generation) are also clueless about the infrastructure itself.
So how many people know they’ll be affected even if they have been informed of the change?
[Tip] If you decide to cut the cord but want to keep your number you can port it to Andrews & Arnold (a small ISP, based in Bracknell) as a £1.80 per month VOIP subscription.
The biggest problems is power. The phone company power the POTS line — you can even make an emergency call from an abandoned building with no electrical service (and no phone subscription) if you find a jack and plug in. Under those huge central office buildings are huge banks of -48 V batteries which are required to provide a week of power (or was it two in the US? I can’t remember).
Now you’ll have a router with a battery that the owner doesn’t know about and won’t service, so that within a year or so it won’t work. In an emergency: no phone service.
This assumes that anyone has maintained the 48V infrastructure, which doesn’t seem like something that will be feasible considering the insignificant quantity of customers using true copper landline service.
The other problem with customers preferring not to have landlines is that by the time they need them, it’s too late to convince them to buy a traditional telephone and plug it in. You are likely to be nursing home age if you still prefer having a landline. You can have amazing infrastructure but if nobody uses it, it’s useless.
What we really have now is cellular sites with their own infrastructure aiming to keep them operational during power outages.
Then we’ve also got various satellite services that are growing in capabilities day by day, and are built in to common devices like iPhones as an SOS method.
I’m not in the UK but my house was built relatively recently and it doesn’t have any telephone jacks. The theoretical benefits of a landline are entirely theoretical. The ship has thoroughly sailed.
AT&T is using old people to market their new cellular-to-POTS bridge product.
The premise is she needs something as reliable as a landline, because during California wildfires the cell towers and power go down.
Maybe someone should have whispered to her that this product uses the same cell towers, or equally-vulnerable broadband. I could not stop laughing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud2LaFDEUho
> Now you’ll have a router with a battery that the owner doesn’t know about and won’t service
In Canada, Bell has actually discontinued battery backup in their latest modems, supposedly because they were having trouble with modems not rebooting correctly.
Verizon forces me if I want battery backup for my ONT to provide 12 D cell batteries.
https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/battery-backup/p...
What a fuckin' joke.
There's some sense in which I prefer this, though, because at least I know how to source D batteries and they're a commonly available standard and I know exactly what their shelf life is. I might even have spares around in my emergency kit for things like lanterns and radios. I've also seen Verizon battery backup units that run on small lead-acid batteries which seem to need frequent replacing, and require me to look up the details and order from a specialty vendor every time... more annoying to keep extras of those on hand and tough luck if it reaches end of life shortly before or during an emergency.
I think a solution to this is mandate providers provide a cellular interface for households for emergency response, with battery backup. Basically a mobile hotspot with a phone jack, speaker, microphone, and red button to call for help attached to a chonky batter pack. Device inventory and health is required to be reported to regulators.
This solves for power, and reporting means it’s trivial to log and audit if the devices are online and available for emergency service calls.
If a mobile tower isn’t available in the area, a tower must be made available for the sector coverage.
Anything else in a world of fiber to the home is compliance theater, as your example shows.
How many people still have a corded phone, and how many of those would remember that those phones still work when there's no power?
It's much more important to ensure that the cell network is resilient. Backup power, mobile towers that can be deployed to disaster areas, and continuing the rollout of satellite connectivity will help far more people than maintaining landline infrastructure.
You wont have a battery. In the UK they stopped providing a battery backup when they switched to the newer ONT quite a while ago, and routers typically do not include one either.
There are a few generic router battery backup products on the market but none specifically get advertised as working on the ONT, but many do. Realistically though they're utterly pointless when you can pick up a vastly superior APC UPS for the same price.
An interesting component of the switching off of POTS is that the quality of service requirements are different. POTS is regulated to require the phone company to maintain a certain legal quality of service with negative consequences for failing to do so.
Meanwhile, cell phone and VOIP services are "best effort."
The phone company put a pretty huge amount of effort into maintaining QoS (Lily Tomlin jokes aside) because there were consequences for not doing so. It makes sense that they would prefer to shed that responsibility.
In some places of Europe, the internet ADSL technology on the copper wires, the same as used for PSTN phones, delivers higher speed (realistically an order of few Mbps) compared to congested LTE/4G mobile networks (typical 1-3 Mbps). The mobile network providers don't guarantee minumim speeds in the contracts, and customers (typically older people) that move from ADSL to LTE/4G, are left with a degraded service without a possibility to object.
That’s too bad, in California it’s all the same:
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/internet-and-p...
“Best efforts” is a legal term. Its definition can vary from state to state, but it is not just, “oh we tried, sorry, lol” and it defines the highest standard of implementation in all jurisdictions.
[flagged]
> Anyone with concerns should contact their provider, but the responsibility cannot rest with customers alone.
Best of luck contacting your provider
> … public awareness seems low that analog phone services will soon be disconnected.
What’s the level of public awareness that they’re even using the landline service? My 98yo grandmother has had the “same” phone service (with the same phone number) for decades. She’s completely unaware of the infrastructure it runs on.
I happen to know that her area was converted to all fiber digital years ago, but she wouldn’t know that. Her children (my parents’ generation) are also clueless about the infrastructure itself.
So how many people know they’ll be affected even if they have been informed of the change?
[Tip] If you decide to cut the cord but want to keep your number you can port it to Andrews & Arnold (a small ISP, based in Bracknell) as a £1.80 per month VOIP subscription.
Finland a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786868
California's also been fighting this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/att-loses-key-ru...
Where is Britland?
UK, but its the register, who's headline comes from a long tradition of taking the piss out of/mirroring the use of, puns from uk tabloids.
I did like "no extensions"
It's still using the same cables if you're not using fttp. Just that the phone is connected through the router first.
most landlines in continental Europe are already VoIP
Internet services are the new walled city? -- be cast out at your own peril; suits the State just fine
It's not like it's banned, they're just not offering it any more. Feel free to make your own communication network.