Phone line switch off

Thinking to the future and the intention of switching off POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) and the implementation of phone calls over some form of DSL - i.e. VOIP.

How's this going to work?

I have a master DECT phone with answering machine and 2 DECT handsets.

Will I be connecting these into my Fritzbox and them working as they currently do, or am I going to need to buy new handsets?

I know the Fritzbox 7530 has a DECT implementation that can be enabled.

Yes exactly. In the case of a phone service provided by Zen, use their router and attach your existing analogue DECT base to the FXS port on it.

You could also have third party VoIP service as well (concurrently if you wish) that runs 'over the top' of your internet connection - simply use another ATA (analogue telephone adapter), soft phone, or another endpoint which can directly terminate a VoIP (SIP) connection like a VoIP compatible DECT base.

Lots of ways to skin that cat. The future is bright

In reply to a post by nbarker:

I have a master DECT phone with answering machine and 2 DECT handsets.

Will I be connecting these into my Fritzbox and them working as they currently do, or am I going to need to buy new handsets?

I know the Fritzbox 7530 has a DECT implementation that can be enabled.

Maybe different FritzBoxes are different but mine has a DECT and VoIP built-in. So it takes care of being the base station and answering machine. The VoIP line also gets sent through the DECT (so two lines on one handset).

I moved my old landline number to Sipgate when I had the chance so I've been able to take my landline number to various houses. Will that be possible in future if you are using an ISPs number? Will phone numbers become a bit like email addresses, fine as long as you stay with that one provider?

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Yes exactly. In the case of a phone service provided by Zen, use their router and attach your existing analogue DECT base to the FXS port on it.

You could also have third party VoIP service as well (concurrently if you wish) that runs 'over the top' of your internet connection - simply use another ATA (analogue telephone adapter), soft phone, or another endpoint which can directly terminate a VoIP (SIP) connection like a VoIP compatible DECT base.

Lots of ways to skin that cat. The future is bright

Quite apart from the fact that you have no phone service during a power cut, the loss of POTS is taking us back to the dark ages. Your local mobile phone mast won't be providing a mobile phone service either (assuming you haven't run your batter down already). You also enter a whole new ball game for intruder alarms and lifts to call the emergency services whereas previously POTS was an ideal solution.

Routers aren't generally located in ideal locations for your analogue base station upon which the phone is placed for a charge up. So hardware that was perfectly adequate one day becomes decidedly obsolete overnight. The slow transition over to a VoIP service as SOGEA is rolled out leaves the end consumer picking up the tab for new phone hardware. It just accelerates greater use of mobile phones.

A bright feature for better internet speeds is one thing, but having to build a bonfire to send smoke signals to call the emergency services when the power is off for days on end is now on the agenda in the 21st century.

Yep the world has to move on, if the platform is burning you need to step off it, eventually. Most countries now have PSTN retirement plans either complete or underway.

Its called moving with the times.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Yep the world has to move on, if the platform is burning you need to step off it, eventually. Most countries now have PSTN retirement plans either complete or underway.

Its called moving with the times.

More like moving a small part of the population to a much more dangerous situation all in the name of progress. This of course has no impact on and does not worry those who are not in that small proportion and are instead quite happy to pull up the drawbridge,

trolloybus / gonepostal

PSTN equipment is dying on it's feet . How many computers have you got still running that you brought in the period 1984-1995 and use every day? That is what PSTN is.

There is no voice revenue stream to replace it with something as expensive so it has to be turned off

Power cost alone is more than the call revenue .

( I do have a 64k Spectrum that will sort of work but I wouldn't trust it to work 24/7 or even 24hours)

.

The rental revenue for OR is also much reduced. The ISP price is hugely inflated so the headline broadband price on the bundles looks low. Though very few providers easily show the breakdown of the bundle, and most major ones only do bundled or SOGEA. SOGEA prices being very similar to, (or slightly above?) the bundle ones, for the same reason.

In reply to a post by kitcat:

trolloybus / gonepostal

PSTN equipment is dying on it's feet . How many computers have you got still running that you brought in the period 1984-1995 and use every day? That is what PSTN is.

There is no voice revenue stream to replace it with something as expensive so it has to be turned off

Power cost alone is more than the call revenue .

( I do have a 64k Spectrum that will sort of work but I wouldn't trust it to work 24/7 or even 24hours)

.

Hello kitcat,

The real estate costs of any POTS exchange is huge with the equipment well beyond its sell buy date. Revenue returns from line rental and call charges make it uneconomical to invest in new equipment, but there is a niche market for an always on voice service which is difficult to replicate with VoIP when the power is lost.

I accept everything you say in your posting. Fortunately VoIP is widely available for POTS subscribers ,to switch over to and it becomes just like another service on a broadband connection. In actual fact I have been a VoIP user since 1998 but continue to find it difficult to understand why there are call charges to use the service. You don't have to pay a charge to send an email, so what is so special about VoIP that usage is chargeable? Some hosted VoIP providers do provide free calls if on the same platform but that is not common and rarely are there gateways between VoIP providers.

A further annoyance is the cost to ring 07 numbers from VoIP. Yesterday I rang Vancouver from the UK and had a 30 minute conversation costing just 60p followed by a 30 minute to a mobile number located across town and that call cost £2.88. That is just madness where one is so much more expensive than the other.

Nothing is further from the truth by saying Digital Voice is something very new or 100% better than POTS in every case. VoIP always has been a feature rich service with massive economical benefits for the end consumer but in a few applications, POTS really is better with currently no satisfactory alternative.

I sympathise with this. I'm getting on a bit myself now, and I don't like change, but I can still cope - I hope. I know several older folks in my village who have never had a PC or the internet. Some are housebound, and don't have mobile phones. They don't need them. They rely on their POTS phones for communication. Many of these are going to struggle to adapt.

Ofcom is requiring phone providers to offer a simple internet connection for people who don't want broadband. Ofcom also requires companies to identify vulnerable customers and provide some form of backup where necessary in case of power failure. In most cases that is likely to be battery backup for at least 1 hour for the ONT, which should allow people or their telecare equipment to get out a last gasp help message. But as Arwen has just reminded us, if for example a catastrophic event takes out both power and comms lines, then there are limits to what technology can do. Protecting against the worst case scenario may just not be possible. We may have to fall back onto old fashioned human kindness.

My wife and I were both responsible, in the next-of-kin sense, for elderly parents who didn't live nearby. Both lived alone, both stubbornly refused to go into sheltered accommodation or homes, neither had internet or mobiles, and both suffered from encroaching dementia towards the end. One fortunately had a telecare alarm which she/he had learned to use before the dementia really set in. The other became too deaf to use a regular phone, but because of the dementia was unable to learn to use the textphone we got for her/him. She/he became incommunicado. We had to rely on neighbours keeping an eye and alerting us if curtains were not being drawn etc. I would strongly advise anyone reading this who might be in a similar situation to start planning NOW for how they could adapt to the coming changes, and if that involves the vulnerable person having to learn some new way of doing something, then the sooner the appropriate training is commenced, the better.

Edited by Thaumaturge (Tue 07-Dec-21 08:00:04)

In reply to a post by trolleybus:

In reply to a post by kitcat:

trolloybus / gonepostal

PSTN equipment is dying on it's feet . How many computers have you got still running that you brought in the period 1984-1995 and use every day? That is what PSTN is.

There is no voice revenue stream to replace it with something as expensive so it has to be turned off

Power cost alone is more than the call revenue .

( I do have a 64k Spectrum that will sort of work but I wouldn't trust it to work 24/7 or even 24hours)

.

Hello kitcat,

The real estate costs of any POTS exchange is huge with the equipment well beyond its sell buy date. Revenue returns from line rental and call charges make it uneconomical to invest in new equipment, but there is a niche market for an always on voice service which is difficult to replicate with VoIP when the power is lost.

I accept everything you say in your posting. Fortunately VoIP is widely available for POTS subscribers ,to switch over to and it becomes just like another service on a broadband connection. In actual fact I have been a VoIP user since 1998 but continue to find it difficult to understand why there are call charges to use the service. You don't have to pay a charge to send an email, so what is so special about VoIP that usage is chargeable? Some hosted VoIP providers do provide free calls if on the same platform but that is not common and rarely are there gateways between VoIP providers.

A further annoyance is the cost to ring 07 numbers from VoIP. Yesterday I rang Vancouver from the UK and had a 30 minute conversation costing just 60p followed by a 30 minute to a mobile number located across town and that call cost £2.88. That is just madness where one is so much more expensive than the other.

Nothing is further from the truth by saying Digital Voice is something very new or 100% better than POTS in every case. VoIP always has been a feature rich service with massive economical benefits for the end consumer but in a few applications, POTS really is better with currently no satisfactory alternative.

Calls on-net, that is VoIP to VoIP on the sample platform are as you’d expect are typically free.

When you call a mobile number however, those are typically not part of the VoIP providers network and the calls must transit onto the mobile operators network - they charge the connecting provider for the privilege. With mobile to mobile calls the various telco operators effectively charge set offs between themselves to settle.

For the VoIP providers they have no mobile network to offset incoming calls from competing networks. Therefore they have to pay. Therefore you the user have to pay.

Landline calls similarly terminating on traditional telco networks are similarly charged.

How the actual wholesale call costs will work in future once legacy telco switched networks are gone remains to be seen. They will however have a massive reduction in their fixed and operating costs that will disappear once they move to a full IP based solution.

How true. But not a new problem in itself. Sixty years ago, I had to pay for the installation of a sharerd landline telephine for my parents when they moved int
o the wilds (near where Alwen has just hit) to save me driving 100+ miles each way to contact them. They had their own generator but only my father and I could operate it, So if he was ill communication relied on the telephones supply from BT and they were without electricity. Definitely try and avoid such scenarios by foresight.

For a landline-equivalent experience I'm hoping to allow some contacts to "direct dial" my SIP URL without being registered to a hosted provider
(given a static public IP and suitable public DNS entry).
I know that was possible even with an old SIP desktop client like Ekiga.

For IPv6 that would even work for multiple phones inside without port forwarding.

I can only imagine if the PSTN had been originally designed for user control over rejecting unsolicited calls (like a firewall does for unsolicited incoming connections).

However I can understand why people would want the convenience of a centralised directory, the ability to register from multiple devices including mobile (e.g. ring wherever I am logged in / follow me / presence) and other benefits of effectively using a hosted provider.

It would be great if SIP desk phones could reach commodity pricing below the £20 per unit for those who want the same form factor.
But I would probably go with a hybrid system (IP/Dect base for cordless handsets) which I've used before, and I think the majority will be mobile first by the time PSTN ceases.

I wonder if any base stations will allow Bluetooth pairing as another way to receive the "home" call on a mobile
(even a feature phone without Wi-Fi / Internet) as people are already familiar with pairing with their car audio
(I realise is somewhat the reverse because the car is in effect the headset but think there is another profile for this function).


But perhaps I'll look at a combination of self-hosting a SIP server on Linode or similar.
I've wanted to experiment with a Jitsi server too when I have more time.

I've heard it suggested that over time SIP trunk providers have merged or been bought out to the extent that when you use a commercial service, the underlying trunks are relying on relatively few massive providers (especially in the USA).

That may be a factor in how the market has re-introduced per-unit-time charging or buying bulk minutes because for a long while it was marketed as a saving over analogue PBX systems.

Edited by prlzx (Tue 07-Dec-21 00:48:13)

I took the jump after I had FTTP installed in August.

I've signed up on the Bronze package with Andrews and Arnold.

They ported my existing number within a few days and I was up and running.

It does need a bit of technical know how to configure, but it isn't difficult.

My home phone charges are now £1.20 per month plus around 1.5p per min. We mainly use our mobiles for outgoing calls, so the monthly bill hasn't been more than £1.50 yet - a huge saving over line rental and call package!

Additionally, using VPN to our home network and the Fritz 'Fon' app on my mobile I can use my mobile as if it was the home phone - will be very useful and save a lot of money when we go the US next year because I'll be able to make calls to the UK as if they were from the home phone.

I use the Acrobits Groundwire app on my phone to terminate my landline numbers.

The best thing about the Groundwire setup is it keep the third party provider SIP connection/sub open using their servers (independent of your SIP provider) so inbound calls don’t even need the app on your phone to be running at all (let alone VPN) to run they just using native iOS or Android push to notify an inbound call. Battery on the mobile is completely unaffected as nothing extra to run in the background.

It’s all very seamless and other than the one off cost for the app, no ongoing sub.

As long as you can get mobile service, you can be in deepest darkest Peru and seamlessly receive landline calls on your smartphone from your neighbour in Peterborough.