Yikes, I have 3 days left. What on earth should I do?

I live in London. Plusnet & all the other providers I've looked at do not support land line and would require me to stay with my existing provider (BT). Even the offers provided by BT excluded landline.

If I stay with BT now my contract has ended, costs will rocket.

Presumably, if I accepted one of these non-land line offers, I would be able to retain our existing phone number and our landline phone would plug into the back of the router.

We are both in our 70's and I don't like the idea of not being able to call out if there is a power cut and our mobile phones are out of action.

Yikes, I have 3 days left. What on earth should I do?

In reply to a post by Tantalus:

I don't like the idea of not being able to call out if there is a power cut and our mobile phones are out of action.

When was the last time you had a prolonged power outage in your part of London? When was your mobile phones last out of action? How far are your nearest neighbour?

Edit: have you called your existing provider to discuss?

Edited by deleted (Sun 18-Sep-22 09:11:21)

I take it that you're in an area with FTTP (fibre to the premise) available, and a copper stop sell is in force?

In reply to a post by Tantalus:

Presumably, if I accepted one of these non-land line offers, I would be able to retain our existing phone number and our landline phone would plug into the back of the router.

Some providers do what you describe (e.g. BT, Sky, Vodafone, Zen).

Other providers simply give you no voice service at all with FTTP (e.g. Plusnet, Talktalk) - in which case you'd lose your phone number, if you didn't first transfer it to a third-party voice-over-IP (VOIP) service.

In reply to a post by Tantalus:

We are both in our 70's and I don't like the idea of not being able to call out if there is a power cut and our mobile phones are out of action.

Yikes, I have 3 days left. What on earth should I do?

Firstly, don't panic. If you spend a few days paying out-of-contract rates, it's not the end of the world.

Everyone in the country will have to have to take the digital voice option very soon regardless. There will be no renewals of analogue voice services from September 2023, and the analogue telephone network will be completely switched off in Dec 2025.

You should talk to your chosen provider. They are required to provide power backup for "vulnerable" customers, although only for a minimum of 1 hour.

If you want longer than that, there are various options for UPSes and battery packs which you can buy yourself and would give you longer run times.

If you have good mobile coverage, you could always keep an extra mobile for emergencies, and keep it charged up and/or with an external battery pack. You can put a PAYG SIM in it if you like for testing, but it will make 999 calls without any SIM.

Edited by candlerb (Sun 18-Sep-22 09:57:03)

Very few power cuts put mobiles out of action. It would have to be a major long one.

They could also buy a cheap "hand crank charger" for mobiles. Amazon has several, including one built into a small FM/AM radio. Apparently these come from camper requirements.

Maybe also worth considering a all networks sim such as https://onesimallnetworks.co.uk/ which would offer some protection in the event of one network going down

You could get a small UPS to keep the ONT, Router and Phone powered up during any power cut. ~£100 outlay and will keep those devices on for hours.

I am in a similar situation: potentially a cease of ADSLon the line, retain PSTN with my current provider for a while and an installation/activation of FTTP (broadband only) possibly with another provider. An ISP such as Aquiss https://www.aquiss.net/unlimited-fttp-fibre-broadband/ will do a 40/10 service for around the £30 mark but that would increase my monthly costs by more than £15.

Hard times ahead for us pensioners

I take it that you're in an area with FTTP (fibre to the premise) available, and a copper stop sell is in force?

Correct.

Over the last year we have had problems with our broadband speed and reliabilty. I bought a new laptop which supported WiFi6 and that has improved the speed.

Some of our friends have already gone over to digital voice. When calling them from the landline we are sometimes cut off which never happened when we had a landline to landline connection.

Our area is densely populated and in the past the sub-station has tripped a number of times in the past. I'll see what UPS's Ebay has to offer.

My wife is hard of hearing so I bought some expensive landline phones for her. Hence my desire to keep our land line phones.

This is going to be a terrific shock to many of our friends who are in their 70/80s and know nothing about this. Many are struggling to make ends meet as it is.

Telecoms companies should have done much more and sent letters out to everyone outlining what is going to happen and their options.

I went to the BT website. In our case BT are increasing payment by £7 a month and there is also the added cost of inflation which is likely to be substantial.

Many thanks for all your help, Paul

I am waiting for full fibre to go live, once it does I will be SOGEA. I plan to modify the NTE (which is technically against BTs T&Cs, but they were meant to offer a SOGEA VRI Isolation Plate, however, it seems they never got around to actually manufacturing them). If you are fairly ok with wiring up telephone wiring, or electrical wiring, it's not too bad, if it's a totally new concept, I would avoid doing it.

See the section under Modifying the VDSL SSFP - this applies if you have an MK4 front faceplate. You can get them on ebay if you have an older version e.g. MK3.

https://support.aa.net.uk/VoIP_How_to:_Voice_reinjec...

It looks like I need to remove 3 components from the socket, and get another cable to go from the hub to the socket. For me, the landline is in an upstairs office, I have a single cordless phone up there not a full DECT set (used to have 6 but they went kaput). I have a wall mounted phone downstairs, with a loudspeaker, it takes 4 batteries, and it really outputs, and picks up when you are not beside the phone, so it's pretty handy. Getting wiring here via a standard phone extension would be a right pain, as the flooring has laminate, then a damp proof membrane, then the floorboards are all sealed and glued, below which is insulation which is suspended with a membrane below, then a gap to the ceiling below, old style lath & plaster, below which plasterboard has been screwed into the beams and then reskimmed. I don't want to break the air gap to get down there.

I wired the house up with dual satellite, coaxial for freeview, cat 6 for ethernet under the floorboards before we did the work above. I have ducting but not down to that old socket where the phone is, a right pain!