But imagine if a burglar or gang came to my house/flat and confiscated my phone and turned off the internet and I can't call the police or anyone for help, I'll be completely helpless.

Compare this to a house currently with only voice line (which is what is generally being discussed here) where they have a handset plugged in to the living room socket - maybe an extension lead to the bedroom. The burglar just has to either keep them away from the handset or unplug the lead from the socket - how is that any better than the situation you describe?

You have seen posters on these forums with a 1000 metre distance cabinet from their home in some rural areas and they are achieving only around 20Mbps download, some even less. While a few lucky people get around 30Mbps!

The broadband USO for a "decent connection" (Ofcom definition) is 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up. You are saying people have low speeds when 1000m from the cabinet but the numbers you quote are at least double the USO for what Ofcom considers "decent".

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

One kilometre is not nothing when it comes to FTTC! You can't get very high sync speed.

Correct, but it's what many people have to live with. The old definition of "superfast" was 24Mbps, and you'll get that at over a kilometre: old graph here.
https://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/chart-of-bt...

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

You have seen posters on these forums with a 1000 metre distance cabinet from their home in some rural areas and they are achieving only around 20Mbps download, some even less. While a few lucky people get around 30Mbps! Those affected, rightfully question, "what was the point of upgrading to FTTC, if the download speeds won't be much better than ADSL"?

Because even at those distances, it will be faster than ADSL. I think the crossover (when VDSL becomes slower than ADSL) is at about 2.5-3km. This is because VDSL doesn't use the lower frequencies that ADSL does, to avoid interference between the two.

And in general, people are closer to their cabinet than to their exchange. (They certainly can't be any further).

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

You cannot get 50-80Mbps on FTTC with a 1000 meter cabinet.

And nobody said you could. But you don't need anything like those speeds for VOIP. Around 0.2Mbps up and down is sufficient.

And, as I understood it, the IP based alarms have a "keep alve" so if that disappears the monitoring centre should know.

In reply to a post by MHC:

And, as I understood it, the IP based alarms have a "keep alve" so if that disappears the monitoring centre should know.

That provoked a few interesting thoughts.

Given we are taking about a power failure and panic alarms, all the monitoring centre knows is that the connection is down. If a single occurrence in the postcode, and bearing in mind that we can have selective power failures of only one phase, (roughly 1 in 3 of the postcode), what is the company supposed to do? (Ignoring the problem of adjacent codes on the same sub-station).

Ignore the disconnection, or notify all affected?

There would also be the problem of notifying any responsible person such as a nearby relative, who is possibly the quickest responder, if their power is also off. The relative's mobile is the obvious answer but that fails if the number supplied is their landline.

Social carers, if applicable, should still be easily notified but probably a slower response.

There will always be the "what if" and "when to respond" questions with whatever system there is. From experience seeing an old PSTN based system in use and information from manufacturers of IP based - the IP based is way better.

For example, several smoke detectors installed - but also fitted with a microphone and speaker allowing localised talk back to a patient, or even potentially a camera (subject to agreement/data protection/other rules).

In reply to a post by ian72:

You have seen posters on these forums with a 1000 metre distance cabinet from their home in some rural areas and they are achieving only around 20Mbps download, some even less. While a few lucky people get around 30Mbps!

The broadband USO for a "decent connection" (Ofcom definition) is 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up. You are saying people have low speeds when 1000m from the cabinet but the numbers you quote are at least double the USO for what Ofcom considers "decent".

Sure those figures may still be double than the USO figures.
But let's face it the 10Mbps/1Mbps are opinions of David Cameron back in 2015. It was in fact his words that got this figure to become an official Ofcom definition. We are almost a decade ahead of the decent broadband speed definitions. What was decent back then is no longer decent now.

Plus David Cameron cannot speak on the needs of behalf of everyone. I know YouTubers and video editors need high upload speeds! For some of them even FTTC is quite slow.

When I was on ADSL EO Line just when my dad was uploading a document as attachment on Hotmail I'd get disconnected from the FIFA servers. This was happening in online chess as well. I was wondering for a while why this was happening when I eventually identified that it was because of my dad's uploading that was causing this. The internet download service also paralyzes when uploading a big file and only got restored after the uploading was complete. The uploading was only 20 seconds for a couple of megabyte file but it was enough to cause a drop in the connection and webpages were only buffering.

So after discovering this issue, we had to make sure I'm not playing anything serious online that involves stats before any uploading occurs. So, no doubt 1Mbps Upload is not enough. Not just that but I had a problem where my noise margins would sometimes drop to 1dB and that was also stopping my download speeds. Router will show connected but webpage would fail to load with a white blank page.

Also in 2018 when we were still on ADSL just uploading a 10 minute video, which I recorded of the winter snowing conditions, that took more than 2 hours to complete!

Finally after being upgraded to FTTC from EO Line in October 2019 and I joined TalkTalk FTTC in February 2020 all these problems got resolved and I now get 20Mbps upload and 77-80Mbps download. This also resolved the connection freezes when uploading and the random dropouts due to line noise that we were experiencing under ADSL with all ISPs.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

You cannot get 50-80Mbps on FTTC with a 1000 meter cabinet.

And nobody said you could. But you don't need anything like those speeds for VOIP. Around 0.2Mbps up and down is sufficient.

Yes, you are right and indeed 0.2Mbps is more than enough for VOIP calls!
But my argument is that if your connection speed is flaky and due to unstable noise margins it drops out then that will disrupt phone calls and any devices reliant on an internet connection.

The present ADSL/FTTC speeds are more than enough for VOIP/Alarms but if the connection drops then it can be a disaster!
I know a neighbour here who has CCTV camera installed on his front door and this is connected using Internet WiFi connection.

For example in our residential building there's no CCTV cameras installed on the floors except ground floor, which is kinda useless. This is a massive red flag. Although we have never installed a camera ourselves, we do feel sometimes vulnerable when we go out on a holiday abroad. Because I'm pretty sure that if someone did break into the apartment the neighbours might not intervene or call the police and that's Central London! Especially after Grenfell Tower fire disaster we are no longer allowed to have additional metal security gates installed at our front doors. We were all ordered to remove them yet no CCTV cameras are present on any of the floors, staircase or lifts.

For example you may go on a holiday and want to leave your CCTV camera on and for the peace of mind want to feel that everything is safe. You could potentially view what's going on while you are abroad. A loss of connectivity or downtime means you lose sight of what's going on.