In reply to a post by ian72:

. . . . the maintenance of ensuring batteries are still in good working condition could cost significant amounts for ISPs if they are required to give any level of commitment of length of up time in the event of a power cut.

Against what level of significant amount they are saving by coming away from copper? Presumably there could be some sort of automated monitoring if the battery was part of the supplied infrastructure minimising the day-to-day cost of the task.

In reply to a post by ian72:

The problem usually with battery backups is if they are powered all the time then the batteries tend to run out more quickly (seen often with laptops). And the other issue is if your battery has degraded the first time you may know that is when it cuts out 30 seconds into a power cut - the maintenance of ensuring batteries are still in good working condition could cost significant amounts for ISPs if they are required to give any level of commitment of length of up time in the event of a power cut.

Most decent UPS will monitor the battery and use some sort of battery conditioning.

The thing is it is all about money, let's see how much more millions of pounds we can make for our rich shareholders, and it doesn't matter about the consumers.
this country has gone to pot, services in this country is pathetic.

In reply to a post by GonePostal:

Against what level of significant amount they are saving by coming away from copper? Presumably there could be some sort of automated monitoring if the battery was part of the supplied infrastructure minimising the day-to-day cost of the task.

Probably not that much, and given PSTN is ending over copper (in most of the UK long before full fibre arrives) there is no connection.

In reply to a post by ian72:

I expect so - and the cost of maintaining them is built in to that. The cost of maintaining batteries at every single premises I would guess could be pretty significant.

Yes, batteries in a home will be much smaller, whereas in a large chassis such as the Huawei 288 line cabinets there will be maybe 3 or 4 car batteries, heavy old style lead acid type, which are predictable and give maybe 30mins power cut resilience.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

The thing is it is all about money, let's see how much more millions of pounds we can make for our rich shareholders, and it doesn't matter about the consumers.
this country has gone to pot, services in this country is pathetic.

Portugal, Spain and others have already switched off copper. They have the same challenges and have overcome them to their regulator's satisfaction.

The phone service over fibre won't be as resilient as POTS. The various reliability improvements should keep the difference minimal.

The current phone service operates on 5-9s reliability, 99.999%. 5 minutes, 15 seconds of downtime a year. Even taking that down to 99.99%, a low expectation of a battery backup operating service, with a mobile SIM, you're talking 52 minutes, 40 seconds of downtime.

I genuinely don't understand why you're wanting to die on this particular hill. At some point whether people want to move or not they're going to be compelled to. Ofcom have already given a forced move to VoIP a green light and money isn't a consideration for them.

TalkTalk and Sky are absolutely on board, they want to retire most of the kit they have in exchanges. It's getting on and isn't used anywhere near as much at it was. With them and BT Wholesale all getting rid that's basically the entire market. Virgin Media are trying to retire it on their cable network.

TalkTalk have stuck their head above the parapet and handled it poorly but you'll see letters with various tone going out across the board until, eventually, the last holdouts are given an ultimatum.

What then? Protest about companies wanting to replace in some cases pre-war cabling with modern cabling fit for purpose for the foreseeable future?

In reply to a post by XGS_Is_On:

Portugal, Spain and others have already switched off copper. They have the same challenges and have overcome them to their regulator's satisfaction.

The phone service over fibre won't be as resilient as POTS. The various reliability improvements should keep the difference minimal.

The current phone service operates on 5-9s reliability, 99.999%. 5 minutes, 15 seconds of downtime a year. Even taking that down to 99.99%, a low expectation of a battery backup operating service, with a mobile SIM, you're talking 52 minutes, 40 seconds of downtime.

I genuinely don't understand why you're wanting to die on this particular hill. At some point whether people want to move or not they're going to be compelled to. Ofcom have already given a forced move to VoIP a green light and money isn't a consideration for them.

TalkTalk and Sky are absolutely on board, they want to retire most of the kit they have in exchanges. It's getting on and isn't used anywhere near as much at it was. With them and BT Wholesale all getting rid that's basically the entire market. Virgin Media are trying to retire it on their cable network.

TalkTalk have stuck their head above the parapet and handled it poorly but you'll see letters with various tone going out across the board until, eventually, the last holdouts are given an ultimatum.

What then? Protest about companies wanting to replace in some cases pre-war cabling with modern cabling fit for purpose for the foreseeable future?

as I have said before going to digital voice makes no difference to me, I have had VoIP for years, but i do feel for the older people that may get confused by it, and what happens to alarms and that sort of thing? As i have said in on here about someone I chat to being pushed to fibre, he has alarms that rely on analogue phones, and he has been told they will not work on a digital voice system, even if plugged into an adaptor. Not sure why, i thought surly, if these alarms are sending an analogue signal, then they should work. But saying that, some fax machines will not work on VoIP, I tried it a few years ago, not my Fax.

My thing is more to do with fibre and people being pushed to that and yes the way Talk Talk done it is wrong and disgusting, I don't care if it's trial or not. If a comp[an y done that to me, then I would just tell them I am going else where.

It seems by what I have read that FTTC will be with us longer.

A zzoomm van have pulled up outside my house a few minutes ago and some signs up, I can hear them digging up the road now. I am dreading how they will leave the pavements.

I have not seen openreach around here for a few days now, since they put the equipment on the poles, so I don't know when they are going to be doing theirs. If they don't hurry up, they will lose people as they will go to zzoomm.

when i first heard about fibre coming here, I thought great i will go for that, but thinking it over a few times i thought, what is the point, I don't need the speed, the quality of my connection is good and have been reliable for a couple of years or more now. So may as well stay as I am.

Alarms may use frequencies outside of the range supported by VoIP - VoIP is going to primarily deal with frequencies within human hearing ranges and faxes/modems/etc would use frequencies outside of these ranges. VoIP may also be implementing levels of compression on the line that could remove important frequencies for an analogue modem based connection - something the human ear wouldn't really notice but that analogue data traffic would be heavily impacted by.

For most older people the move will be pretty seamless - unplug the phone from the BT socket and plug it into the router. They won't care how it works. If they have wired extensions and the like then it could well be much more of an issue - not sure how much help BT provide in that scenario. My mum was moved over to BT Digital Voice and it made no real difference to her at all.