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Terry Everall

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Can someone please explain to me what this is ? IN SIMPLE TERMS 

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Conventional landlines are going to be phased out completely in a few years time.  Your current phone will no longer be plugged into the phone socket but into your broadband hub.  I received a new Virgin hub a few weeks ago which is equipped and ready for the changeover.  Meanwhile, relax and wait.

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Voice Over Internet Protocol.   Can only assume the intent is to eliminate all the conventional telephone exchanges and have an entirely IP infrastructure.

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4 hours ago, Terry Everall - WSCC Competition Secretary said:

Can someone please explain to me what this is ? IN SIMPLE TERMS 


THE MAGIC HAPPENS A DIFFERENT WAY. 

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2 hours ago, corsechris said:

Voice Over Internet Protocol.   Can only assume the intent is to eliminate all the conventional telephone exchanges and have an entirely IP infrastructure.


100% correct.  All exchanges will disappear and landlines as we know them will be gone by December 2025, but it should be no issue as long as you’ve got an internet connection and a touch tone phone.

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Have there been any statements or articles about what happens if one lives somewhere with no internet and rubbish mobile phone reception? I'm trying to figure out for my dad who lives in the centre of town but (compared to the mobile phone aerials) at the back of a block of flats so 4G signal is dreadful. Will he have to pay the £30 a month for internet rather the £10 for his landline phone?

Can anyone guide me to info please?

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My question above was driven by the fact that it's only 4 years since we succeeded in our campaign to get FTTC to our small village. We were all on exchange only lines with ADSL speeds less than 2mbps at some houses. It was a real struggle to get it upgraded as the village is a couple of miles from the exchange. We now have a fibre cabinet in the village but it still has ancient copper lines downstream (if it rains heavily for 2 days my connection can drop from 35mbps to 20 and stay there until a junction box that has filled with water dries out). So if they're gonna connect us to the cabinet with fibre it will resolve these remaining infrastructure issues. I'm just surprised it's that easy given how hard we had to fight to get to where we are now. 

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Copper will be fine (assuming your copper is actually fine!).

 

Well, I say copper, they replaced it with aluminium years ago ‘cos it’s cheaper….and crapper of course….

 

Used to have broadband supplied by Orange many years ago and that had a VOIP port on the router. Worked fine really. I do recall lots of issues when we switched from the PABX to VOIP phones at work, and the voice quality was often pretty bad, and of course, whoever specced the phones cheaped out and as we were always short of CAT5 port capacity, the computers usually ended up being daisy-chained off the phones, which only had 100Mbps switches in them rather than 1Gbps (because cheap), so that sucked…

 

Voice really doesn’t need that much bandwidth though so it should work fine on even a pretty bad broadband.

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18 hours ago, Stuart said:

Does that mean FTTP to every house then? 

Now Fibre to the Point of use is my understanding of FTTP - would be awesome.

I know there is an infrastructure roll out, so in years to come this will be the case I assume. In the meantime, if you are on copper (aluminium) wires, as I am, best internet speeds are from the roadside cabinet which for me is a mile and about 200 houses away! 😟

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I used to do quite a lot of Voice work and this change has been coming for quite a while. A LOT of work has already gone in to this on the service provider side of things, including Openreach and BT.

 

Voice, even with the highest quality codec (G711u) needs about 1Mb/s of speed and round trip latency of less than 300milliseconds. There are other codecs (G711a, G722, G729)  that can be used to reduce that speed demand a bit so maybe (MAYBE) if there are areas where internet speeds are lower due to location then the voice part of the bandwidth demand can be reduced. And of course it only matters when the phone is in use...

 

Daisy chaining a PC off the back of a phone is quite common in business settings but yes if the phone is only 100Mb then that can be a bit of a compromise, especially if one is transferring large files internally. Externally it usually has less of an impact unless the business internet connection is more than 100Mb/s. The only time I have had issues with call quality was when there was a problem with the analogue line that connects to the IP PBX and until BT stop utilising the old twisted pair phone lines to carry calls and/or IP this is still a possibility.

 

The BT page (https://www.bt.com/broadband/digital-voice) says they will be offering "converters" so that we can keep our existing analogue phones. I guess for homes like mine where I have added a bunch of extensions using the pre-wired extension kits, I'm going to need a few converters...

As for the rest, I'm assuming the analogue copper line from the dwelling to the street box will be in use for a good while yet because getting CAT cable or fibre to every home is a HUGE undertaking. It's just that the "old" phone line will no longer carry an analogue signal, just IP.

The ads for BT and EE saying "full fibre" means fibre all the way to the house/flat. We call this FTTP or Fibre To The Premises. At the moment I think the UK has about 15% of "public" coverage. But public infrastructure (Openreach/BT) aren't the only player here. Look to Hyperoptic, Virgin, Community Fibre, Gigaclear and others out there who are laying their own fibre infrastructure to compete with BT. They all do phones that connect to their routers so they can provide voice services as well as internet. That said, any dwelling in a rural area is going to be behind the curve a bit for all the same reasons it took so long to get even average internet speed to these areas. 

 

 

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Am I right in assuming that my DECT Panasonic 'phone setup with four wireless handsets will simply connect to the existing router and the work just the same?

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Yes. The base station will connect to the hub they send you, then the 4 cordless phones will talk to the hub the same way they do now.

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Copper lines from the exchange to the customer will be around for a long time yet. They will be used for testing whilst ADSL and FTTC are in existence.  FIbre to premises is available to anyone now, not just businesses.

If you want to keep your analogue line, best not to change your supplier or you could end up with VOIP line through router, although it doesn't make any difference to the user.

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