FTTP - what happens to phone line?

Please forgive the question if it's too obvious.

When you get FTTP installed, by default does your copper phone line remain and you just get an additional fibre line coming in for the broadband, therefore the services are completely separate?

Or are you forced/are there options to run the phone over fibre and have some sort of splitter in the house?

Edited by deleted (Thu 04-Sep-14 11:24:53)

You get a choice,

Keep paying voice line rental and have the fibre separate
OR
Ditch copper and pay for Fibre Voice Access which gives you two lines but over the fibre and is broken out onto copper at the Fibre ONT

Bottom third of page at http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/fibre-broadband.... has pictures of the changes at the master socket.

That's great, thank you very much.

Afternoon Andrew

What happens to other devices such as alarms etc - are these also catered for within the Fibre connection; or is the full d-E copper connection still required by such additional uses, if present?


Also do those FVA sources provide the DC voltage for display-type phones, which do not have local power sources such as mains adaptors or batteries?

Are the existing copper phone numbers transferable to the FVA Services?

Edited by deleted (Thu 04-Sep-14 12:14:22)

Say you choose Fibre Voice Access. Would you have to pay two lots of line rental as you have two lines?

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

Say you choose Fibre Voice Access. Would you have to pay two lots of line rental as you have two lines?

If you still want your phone on the copper line and another via FVA then yes

You will need to discuss this with your alarm company.
You may need a new alarm base unit if the existing one cannot have an IP module attached to it....which may be a problem as the sensors would probably also need changing as they wil not longer be compatible with the new base units...so in the end a total new alarm system.
This issue has already been seen with the altnet FTTP companies - old alarms using the BT phone line as part of their operations are a big problem.

All telephones are to some extent voice powered, and thus the ONT creates the required voltage so handsets will work - little point if it did not.

Generally alarms tied into the physical copper will need to remain on copper . Some that JUST do a simple dial might be OK technically but alarm company likely to insist on full copper for power and security issues.

Number porting should be no problem.

The openreach charges cover two lines I believe, but there is the wholesale and retail costs to add so one of those unknown answers.

FVA is very rare, most keep the copper because once you go FVA you add a battery backup pack, and as alts are finding these can be costly. Even to the point that supposedly where Virgin Media is doing TV and broadband over fibre they aren't going to provide voice to get around that USO power cut obligations.

FVA is very rare, most keep the copper because once you go FVA you add a battery backup pack,

Nope, FVA on nearly all FTTP services I install, NOT having FVA as well is the rarity. That said, the majority are for BT Retail, not yet seen an FVA order on a Plusnet service.

Yes the ONTE can provide two lines, but I have yet to see it in practice, just the existing copper number reproved over the FTTP service on the same visit as the install.

The BBU will be fitted whether you take the FVA or not, and in nearly all instances FVA wiring fitted even if not to be used.

I am interested in this thread as eventually native FTTP will be available where I live.

I am now getting confused on the two different options that are available for the phone line and the costs involved both in monthly charges and the likely costs re the backup battery replacement when that eventually happens. Come to that how often is the battery likely to need replacement? Who supplies them, how do you get them? Through contacting the ISP?

What are the pros and cons of the options exactly?

An idiots guide would be appreciated.!

The battery back up unit will be supplied as part of the installation by Openreach, and maintained by them also. I doubt it will pack up very often, t'is a simple thing with rechargeable batteries in it.

I have no idea of costs, but would recommend just taking the FVA and the FTTP broadband all in one go. Simple.

Where a bouts in the country are you ?

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

That said, the majority are for BT Retail, not yet seen an FVA order on a Plusnet service.

Is that possibly because FTTP with Plusnet is still a trial service, and maybe athough my FTTP broadband is with them my line rental is still BT.

Majority of FTTP is for BT Consumer on Infinity

FTTP with Plusnet is still a trial service

I think you will find that the trial is not accepting more customers....it maybe coming to an end

from the plusnet community site here

Just to let you know, we're no longer accepting any new customers onto our FTTP trial.

Ian

Suprised anyone uses there phone line to make calls, If I could get FTTP I would not bother with either voice options as I never use the house phone so I would be paying £15 a month for something I wouldn't use.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

The battery back up unit will be supplied as part of the installation by Openreach, and maintained by them also. I doubt it will pack up very often, t'is a simple thing with rechargeable batteries in it.

I have no idea of costs, but would recommend just taking the FVA and the FTTP broadband all in one go. Simple.

Where a bouts in the country are you ?

I am in Suffolk, Boxford exchange cabinet 1 which has a RFS for FTTP 31/12/2014.

In reply to a post by IranianGiraffe:

Suprised anyone uses there phone line to make calls, If I could get FTTP I would not bother with either voice options as I never use the house phone so I would be paying £15 a month for something I wouldn't use.

Well I will take a phone as I cannot reliably get any mobile signal, sometimes means going for a 200+ metre walk down the road to get any signal or literally hanging out of the bathroom window. Not ideal!

We had FTTP installed 2 weeks ago by BT. The engineer installed a back-up battery and a box with 4 LAN ports and 2 telephone ports; the fibre goes into this box and 1 LAN port is connected to the HomeHub. The engineer (and previous paperwork) said the battery is 'in case BT decide to install a fibre-based telephony service at some point' (I paraphrase). At no point was there any mention of actually choosing such a service! So 'phone over copper, BB over fibre - and damn fine it is too!

In reply to a post by IranianGiraffe:

Suprised anyone uses there phone line to make calls, If I could get FTTP I would not bother with either voice options as I never use the house phone so I would be paying £15 a month for something I wouldn't use.

No mobile signal here in wild and woolly Wales! Terrible broadband too, but all the signs are that we're getting FTTP in the not too distant future, hence my question. But it sounds like not many providers are offering FTTP, never mind FVA, and the line rental would probably be higher than a copper line.

Ofcom reckons 28billion minutes landline calls per year and just 5 billion on mobile

So lots clearly do use landline still.

Morning Andrew

I suspect that those figures include BB usage - any clarification?

Or that the minutes of landline calls involving businesses are still so high and the domestic calls are greatly reduced by the use of mobiles for "private" calls.

I wonder just how much of that is business use. We very rarely use the land line at home, all of us having mobiles, and the wife and I have plenty of inclusive minutes. The children tend to text or use Viber.

If I didn't need the land line for the broadband I'd get rid of it.

If you want to find it on Ofcom site it was from them
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-researc...

When you say includes broadband usage do you mean minutes online using WWW, or time online doing VOIP.

In reply to a post by andygegg:

We had FTTP installed 2 weeks ago by BT. ...
...- and damn fine it is too!

Perhaps it's time to update your profile

In reply to a post by ian007jen:

I think you will find that the trial is not accepting more customers....it maybe coming to an end

Fully aware of that, however as the only option for me in this area is FTTP and it is already installed I doubt they will take existing customers off it at the end of the trial.

Edited by cajef (Fri 05-Sep-14 11:27:45)

In reply to a post by Rastus:

Perhaps it's time to update your profile

Thanks for the reminder - done now!

In reply to a post by csimon:

But it sounds like not many providers are offering FTTP, never mind FVA, and the line rental would probably be higher than a copper line.

Your situation may differ from mine. As part of the Superfast Cornwall stuff there was a commitment to 95% superfast BB availability; where I live ADSL/VDSL was never going to do it (much like you, I suspect) so FTTP is at the same price as a copper-based Infinity offer if it were available. Am I right in thinking there's a Superfast Cymru initiative which should be a similar deal?
I was told the price would work out at about 25p a month extra after the various add-ons, etc. No full month's bill to compare yet!

In reply to a post by andygegg:

In reply to a post by csimon:

But it sounds like not many providers are offering FTTP, never mind FVA, and the line rental would probably be higher than a copper line.

Your situation may differ from mine. As part of the Superfast Cornwall stuff there was a commitment to 95% superfast BB availability; where I live ADSL/VDSL was never going to do it (much like you, I suspect) so FTTP is at the same price as a copper-based Infinity offer if it were available. Am I right in thinking there's a Superfast Cymru initiative which should be a similar deal?
I was told the price would work out at about 25p a month extra after the various add-ons, etc. No full month's bill to compare yet!

Yes, I think there is no difference between FTTC and FTTP pricing, but what I was meaning was the cost of the FVA line. The wholesale cost to providers appears to be more than the current retail PSTN line rental. I was responding to the person above who didn't want to pay £15 line rental for a service he doesn't use, whereas for me £15 is actually the cheapest option for a phone line! I'm on PAYG mobile and don't use it much because of no signal, I spend about £2 per month on calls and text, I suspect he's got a mobile contract that is costing way in excess of £15 per month in addition to ta PSTN line. And if I don't have a PSTN phone line then I'd have to pay more for the phone line over fibre.

In reply to a post by csimon:

In reply to a post by IranianGiraffe:

Suprised anyone uses there phone line to make calls, If I could get FTTP I would not bother with either voice options as I never use the house phone so I would be paying £15 a month for something I wouldn't use.

No mobile signal here in wild and woolly Wales! Terrible broadband too, but all the signs are that we're getting FTTP in the not too distant future, hence my question. But it sounds like not many providers are offering FTTP, never mind FVA, and the line rental would probably be higher than a copper line.

It's understandable for people like yourself who get no mobile signal as obviously you could need to get hold of someone but for myself and 90% of the people I know the home phone is not used for calls at all, mobile costs come in under the price of line rental. (only calls we ever get on the home phone now is business/cold callers)
A friend who is the only person on FTTP out of all of us doesn't have either voice option.
I agree though it was quite a struggle to find an ISP other than BT, AAISP who would actually do it (there were a few others who's name I can't remember, Zen said they were going to add it but it got put back and plusnet you had to sign up for their adsl first and then apply for their FTTP trial but that would of meant getting line first which he didn't want)

Simon

You may find that the costs are nearly the same in total!

The Openreach FTTP costs are biased the other way around to copper so the BB is expensive FTTP rental and the voice cheap but the total will be around the same. (The OR FTTP GEA BB only costs were nearly the same as the BB GEa + Voice GEA costs last time I looked)

All for 80:20 product from OR. rental costs
FTTP £119.4 + Copper line rental.(£91.05) Transition product
FTTP without Copper £220.08
FTTP + FVA £223.08

So FVA cost from Openreach equates to £3 for the 135Kb GEA for voice on top of the BB only cost. Or the transition product Plus the 2010 WLR cost is the same as FTTP+FVA so looks like the prices have not been kept in step as the WLR has dropped since then.

In reply to a post by csimon:

No mobile signal here in wild and woolly Wales! Terrible broadband too, but all the signs are that we're getting FTTP in the not too distant future, hence my question. But it sounds like not many providers are offering FTTP, never mind FVA, and the line rental would probably be higher than a copper line.

Personally I have a VoIP desk phone. SIPgate gives me a "local" telephone number for personal calls, and I have another line for business, it works just like the desk phones most of you will be familiar with from your workplace, multiple simultaneous calls, caller ID, decent speaker mode (proper echo suppression) and so on. Doing it this way saves £7 pcm compared to getting line rental with "free" calls from BT, which more than covers the cost of the SIPgate calls.

However it's certainly true that (for all the bad things said about them here) BT are more reliable. I've probably had two or three occasions each year when the VoIP is unavailable, whereas in ten years with a BT line I had only one serious fault and it didn't render the line totally unusable. Also the BT phone never once interrupted a call to upgrade its firmware and reboot.

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

In reply to a post by csimon:

No mobile signal here in wild and woolly Wales! Terrible broadband too, but all the signs are that we're getting FTTP in the not too distant future, hence my question. But it sounds like not many providers are offering FTTP, never mind FVA, and the line rental would probably be higher than a copper line.

However it's certainly true that (for all the bad things said about them here) BT are more reliable. I've probably had two or three occasions each year when the VoIP is unavailable, whereas in ten years with a BT line I had only one serious fault and it didn't render the line totally unusable. Also the BT phone never once interrupted a call to upgrade its firmware and reboot.

I'm not with BT Retail, however do have Openreach local loop, and my phone line and therefore ADSL are currently dead for about 1 month per year.

I realise this is an old thread

For nearly 3 years, I've had broadband and voice over FTTP (BT Retail ) and voice and broadband (SMPF) on copper (BE / Sky )from the same ONTE

My strong advice is keep the copper for voice - the line rental cost does not differ either

Much simpler if you want to migrate and less likely to go very wrong and BT OR / Wholesale have plenty of years of experience dealing with copper PSTN lines

Thanks for that information.

In saying that "the line rental cost does not differ either", is it charged for separately as though it was a stand-alone item; or is it incorporated/hidden in the FTTP costs or is it in the BE/Sky costs etc?

On the bill from BT where both phone and broadband are on BT and the phone line I use, as both are with BT the bill is combined, but all items are listed separately i.e BT Infinity 100Mb Option1, Line Rental, call add-ons etc
The product is FTTP with Fibre Voice Access (FVA) and I was a trialist with BT

The phone handset is connected to the FTTP ONT

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/5013-openreach-pr...

On the 2nd line which is not used for voice calls at all, I have separate bills - phone bill from BT, broadband bill from Sky

2 different lines, with 2 different phone numbers, one over fibre, the other over copper

It is a bit of a con really, but my FTTP installation and everything after it were a complete nightmare

I was supposed to be able to keep BE broadband without any issue albeit on a different phone number which wasn't an issue with BE - BT placed the wrong order, ceased the copper line, BE cancelled as no phone line. Despite having the correct faceplate, BT disconnected all my extensions and that took 5 engineer visits to sort out

Last year I had a voice fault on FVA - couldn't make or receive calls. Took me ages to sort out as no-one I spoke to (BT India) understood the product or how to report it

I'd already tried disconnecting power to the ONT overnight and disconnecting the battery backup

When I finally got through to the right team, (BT Exeter team) and got it all sorted out, I asked what I should do if there were any further fault in future "Just call 151 from your fibre phone line and you'll be put through to us, the correct team". D'oh. That's an impossible task if you cannot make phone calls on that line

Over 2 weeks without the ability to make or receive calls - I didn't want to redirect calls to another number, as that means no compo

I am happy with it though but it's hard work being a guinea pig

Thanks for those details, enlightening!

I've had broadband and voice over FTTP (BT Retail ) and voice and broadband (SMPF) on copper (BE / Sky )from the same ONTE

You make it sound as though the Sky service is delivered over the FTTP link, which I suspect isn't the case, it's over the 'original' copper pair innit ?

Yes, Sky is over the original copper pair
Hybrid fibre / copper cable to the pole

The router is plugged directly into the test socket as I lose about 3Mbps on the downstream bandwidth plugged into the faceplate

The router is plugged directly into the test socket as I lose about 3Mbps on the downstream bandwidth plugged into the faceplate

There must be extension wiring connected to the faceplate for that kind of loss ?

Yes, 4 extensions
Extensions were noted in the first part of the install and I showed the engineer where each extension socket was
Despite this, they wired the faceplate incorrectly and none of the extensions worked
That took 3 visits to sort and one tried to blame us for dodgy wiring despite no issues before the FTTP install
I then had another visit after the phone line over the copper was ceased. I'd discussed in length my requirement to keep BE Broadband and had every assurance from the trial manager that this would happen
It later transpired after investigation that BE had placed the wrong order and they agreed to fund an additional phone line until the end of the trial but was credited on the bill for the other line

Tis catalogues of errors and the ones in relation to accounts / billing are still coming back to haunt me today

You did volunteer to be a trialist! And the reason they need to trial every aspect is to pick up the type of issues you have faced.

I was an original HIGHWAY triallist, before the first "commercial trial" - and had a few issues however the benefits outweighed the problems for me.