In reply to a post by AUA:

I was partly asking because one of the residents in our road reported that she had been pushed by BT to switch to a digital phone, making me wonder why if she was on FTTC.

That's a completely separate switchover. You can get a digital phone while remaining on FTTC (copper) for broadband; the voice signal goes over the broadband.

Everybody must be switched to digital voice by Dec 2025(*), and to achieve that they are switching people over now, but only about 70% of the UK will have Openreach FTTP available to order by that date.

(*) Excluding people who have only an analogue phone line with no broadband at all: the "SOTAP for Analogue" service is supposed to allow them to keep their analogue phones for a few more years. Also, people who get analogue voice from LLU providers like Talktalk who have their own voice equipment in the exchanges may keep it for a while longer.

Also, surely this means the end of FTTC and its copper wires. So why switch my neighbour to Voip but keep her on FTTC?

You don’t seem to have grasped the basics, the PSTN switch off has nothing to do with the FTTP rollout and eventual total replacement of the copper pair network , FTTC will be around for some, long after the PSTN network has been retired, currently set for December 2025 .

FTTP does not use cabinets ( Openreach network )

BT telephone customers ( not everyone uses BT ) will be moved off PSTN onto an IP based network before PSTN is retired , that can be delivered by ADSL , FTTC as well as FTTP, if you know of someone advised by BT that they are being moved on to DV , that’s simply a planned migration , that will happen eventually to all existing BT telephone customers , others will get DV when they join or potentially when they recontract with BT ( if a telephone service is wanted )

Edited by Iniltous (Tue 30-Apr-24 11:10:47)

In reply to a post by AUA:

Also, surely this means the end of FTTC and its copper wires. So why switch my neighbour to Voip but keep her on FTTC?

You are getting confused, like a lot of people do. Stop sell of analogue voice is different to stop sell FTTC.
My next door neighbour is on Sky FTTC, but have digital voice, saying that at the time we did not have FTTP.

Thank you, and appreciate that your post was not patronising, like another here. I get what you say, but I'm sure I read that analogue phone users would get advance notice and full explanation before they were made to switch. That didn't happen in this case. I'll have to investigate further as the lady I mention is quite agitated about it and says her digital service is constantly causing problems which BT can't solve.

They almost certainly did get advised of the change to DV , it’s nonsensical to think BT would change a customer to DV without prior knowledge as that would result in a fault report ( my service isn’t working ) , unfortunately it may be the case that some are incapable of understanding the correspondence, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any

Edited by Iniltous (Tue 30-Apr-24 11:18:03)

In reply to a post by AUA:

I get the reasoning, but aren't BT required to give some advanced notice and explanation to people about this before doing it?

They are. I got an email from BT in February all about it (but I'm not due to switch over yet).

Do BT usually recover costs from the motorists' insurance for these sorts of incidents?

Yes

In reply to a post by jpm:

Do BT usually recover costs from the motorists' insurance for these sorts of incidents?

No, they don't