In reply to a post by MHC:

On the other side, What of a location where 6, 7,8 or 9 km copper lines are in place so chance of a DSL service - minimal. They may get full fibre eventually, but who pays the bill?

Openreach will pay and it is financially justifiable. The network is being converted totally to fibre as copper + FTTC is too expensive across the network. So it is totally justified on grounds of savings for the network as a whole.

Of course, Openreach could pocket the savings of not fibring the 6, 7, 8 or 9km lines. But then, in the extreme, they would have the additional costs of maintaining and sourcing spares for a tiny estate of Strowger exchanges, where they had never ever faced up to upgrading. Ultimately the costs of supporting outdated equipment for which there is not a large enough spares market will be enough to fibre the lines in question

The last Strowger exchange, AFAIR was closed around 1990, so the legacy switches being retired now are digital System X and System Y exchanges .

Edited by Iniltous (Wed 05-Feb-25 12:59:38)

In our case we are actually quite close to the telephone exchange. less than 0.75 mile to the exchange with the nearest BT termination cabinet about 300m away. The speed estimate however was only 3Mbps over copper cabling. That is why I went FTTC 8 years ago. FTTC was available fortunately. I don't know how the fibres are run from the BT cabinet to wherever they terminate. I believe that about 80 Mbps was available. No digital voice at the time of course.

In our village Trooli have been installing what look like routers at the top of the BT poles everywhere apart from down our road. They are advertising full fibre service availability. They stopped doing this work about 1 year ago so whether our road will ever be done is an interesting question.

Swish installed a new duct in the road over two years ago giving me the only option of a full digital voice/data service now, or for the foreseeable future.

I know there is a BT duct running down part of our road but talking to the BT engineers when they (frequently) need to access the pole in my garden I understand their duct is blocked between "my" pole and the green box on the main road. There are about 15 properties fed overhead from the shared pole in my garden.

In reply to a post by Iniltous:

The last Strowger exchange, AFAIR was closed around 1990, so the legacy switches being retired now are digital System X and System Y exchanges .

I was of course, being facetious, but the very fact that Strowger has been replaced over 30 years ago across the whole network rather makes my point, that after a new technology has been adopted beyond a certain point, it is financially beneficial to replace the old completely

Great Missenden Telephone Exchange became PTSN or SOGEA only in september 2023 so I am not sure where you are checking for this information.

In reply to a post by Iniltous:

The last Strowger exchange, AFAIR was closed around 1990, so the legacy switches being retired now are digital System X and System Y exchanges .

I am surprised there were any strowger switches would still be in use in the 1990s most were replaced by crossbar 1XB and 5XB type switches in the 1950s

You say your new service is about the same price as your heavily discounted original price all while forgetting the old service cost twice as much to run was bought off a third party who wanted their price for the service needed 2 sets of equipment to work and was actually 2 different services going down one cable.

your new service is on new equipment and have just one service the INTERNET.
of course plusnet cannot compete on price they have to pay for DOUBLE the service you now get with swish.

I moved to the Great Missenden exchange in 2016 and the estimated speed for ADSL at the time was around 3 Mbps so I went FTTC having previously had 18 Mbps in Beaconsfield so I went to FTTC for my data straightaway. I was getting 33 Mbps for data when I lived in Beaconsfield,

I renewed the contract several times and last December I looked into alternative as I getting disenchanted with Plusnet. I was NOT dissatisfied with the data rates and my contract renewal was early February 2025. I was getting a SUBSTANTIAL discount from historic referrals so was surprised when the alternative quotations came in slightly lower than the DISCOUNTED price. Perhaps I could have haggled with Plusnet but I decided to move away as they had already stopped mobile phone contracts and offered a discount rate with EE. I halved my mobile bill compared with EE by moving to an alternative supplier. I guessed that they would do the same for phone and broadband. The were already dropping email and website hosting and I had already moved both of these to an alternative host. I had my own domain email and website with them for many years. It is the accumulation of what PlusNet is doing that has been making me increasing less happy with them. The spurious, and incorrect demand, for £4.10 was resisted as a matter of principle!

I am not too familiar with the current terminology to express exactly what I was using. Years ago I designed modem interfaces and knew all of the details to get BT and later BABT approval.

I used searches on the Internet using comparison sites to select two alternative vendors that are actually available at my address. Swish was the ONLY one that could offer FTTP now as they had already laid ducting. Vodafone could offer FTTC. Trooli offer FTTP service in most of our village but currently not in our road. Both were roughly the same price with Vodafone being more expensive for telephone calls. I flipped a coin and picked Swish. It was also marginally easier to modify my home telephone cabling for Swish, Both were lower cost than my "discounted" rate from Plusnet even before the annual Plusnet rise due shorty. I chose not to ask Plusnet for their offering.

In reply to a post by pyarwood:

In reply to a post by Iniltous:

The last Strowger exchange, AFAIR was closed around 1990, so the legacy switches being retired now are digital System X and System Y exchanges .

I am surprised there were any strowger switches would still be in use in the 1990s most were replaced by crossbar 1XB and 5XB type switches in the 1950s

Last Strowger went in 1995!

In reply to a post by steelej02:

I can find no date for the switch off of the Great Missenden exchange. It was NOT on the stop sell list last time I checked

You are confusing two different things.

PSTN stop sell applies to *all* exchanges, and has since 5 Sep 2023. This means that *everyone* is being migrated to digital voice. You should, however, note that digital voice does not require fibre; you can have digital voice over a copper broadband line. The digital-only copper lines which are now being sold are known as SOGEA in the case of FTTC, or SOTAP in the case of ADSL. These are pure broadband, with no analogue baseband signal. That is, if you plugged a handset into the copper master socket, you'd hear nothing. Instead, if you want a voice service, you plug the handset into your router, which generates the dial tone locally and provides voice-over-IP across the digital broadband.

Copper stop sell is the thing you're thinking of. That is indeed announced by exchange area. It is triggered when an exchange area reaches 75% FTTP coverage, but only applies to those properties where FTTP is available to order: i.e. for as long as FTTP is not available to you, you can continue to use your copper and order new copper-based broadband services.

Just to muddy things slightly, most FTTP is *not* served from the local exchange, but from about 1000 larger "head end exchanges" or "OHPs". I don't know whether Great Missenden is an OHP; if it is not, then when you do eventually get FTTP it will be from a different exchange. This will result in the closure of a large proportion of the local exchanges.

However, none of this affects the switch-off of analogue voice (PSTN), which will happen for everyone, copper or fibre. There will be people on copper broadband for many years to come, just with no analogue dial-tone on the copper.

More info:
https://www.openreach.com/news/the-final-call-for-th...