They are turning off landlines in 2025!

[Roland68]

I'm sure other countries will be following suit, but they are turning off landlines in the UK by 2025 (I think). A 'landline' phone will still be available, but it will be VOIP - so not a telephone line in the old fashioned sense of the word, but sent through the internet.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Two things:

1. Internet can be incredibly patchy, by which I mean the uptime of an internet connection is likely far lower than a landline. I think in the last 10 years I've never noticed a landline that is dead, while in 10 years my internet has probably 'gone down' upwards of 20 times (granted, I use the internet far more frequently, so would notice downtime). Yes, this has mainly been in the early morning or for short bursts, but some providers (looking at you talktalk, dunno if they exist any more) are so poor, I wouldn't be surprised if people had something like only 96 or 97% uptime with them.

How do you use the phone if your internet is down...well, you don't!

2. OK, OK....EVERYONE has a mobile phone these days. Well, yes, but recently I have been having problems with that too. The uptime compared to a traditional landline is rather poor. I have had signal from multiple networks dropout for sometimes DAYS at a time. The mobile phone providers obviously have some issue with their antennas and/or have little concern in providing the same amount of reliability as a landline, so it is fine is people go without proper signal for days on end...

What do you think, am I worrying about nothing or is the humble landline going to be something we miss when it is gone for good, replaced by other technology that while more handy, is significantly less reliable?

You are more wrong than you think.
The landline that you mean is long gone. After a few hundred meters or a few kilometers, it runs just like the rest of the communication over the normal data networks. Of course there are places in this world where this is not the case, but fewer and fewer. And the necessary technology for this is no longer manufactured, can hardly be repaired and there are fewer and fewer technicians who are familiar with it.
Actually long overdue. Far too much money has already been sunk into the old technology.

 

[FrantzM]

Hi

This is coming from a, "Telecom" Engineer, now re-formatted to an IT Engineer ..
POTS were designed with utter reliability in the design. 99.999% , the fabled five-nine, was quite common. It was almost mandated that the phone service would be the last thing to go in case of emergencies. Central Offices, you remember those ... had huge piles of batteries to keep communications, in your homes going for more than 48 hours... even if all kind of other mean of power would be out... And this in numerous locales , even the most backward countries..
Then came the Internet , where outages were tolerated because, for "serious" communications, you still had POTS.. then the Internet came to be everything, even for voice communications. Its traditions of quasi-regular outages didn’t change, because it was never built with five nine in mind... Now they are removing all POTS or so it seems, I haven't read the article yet. By the look of trends, most people in the USA do not own a landline anyway .. In my country this is not even underway, it is likely that there is no land line at all (I'll check, but am close to certain that there aren't any in 2023)... But, and I repeat, the tradition of Internet outages is vibrant in here: Every other day, we are left with 5 to 30 minutes of Internet non-access... and we accept it .. and other people in other countries accept it... Blindly believing that once their phones (or router) is charged the infrastructure that supports will always be ready to provide services ... It ain't so. Internet tighter regulation has been an issue for years and is fought with ferocity. IF something has to provide an essential, Communications, it ought to have a mandate to do it as well as possible within the limits of the economically feasible. Such is not the case at least IIRC in the USA, The, trendsetter of all things pertaining to deregulation of the Telecom (yes) Industry.
This to me is concerning, very much so ...

More later, perhaps

Peace.

 

[Berwhale]

Thanks to the last Australian government, we have HFC for our internet connection, shared through the block, and if power goes down we're out. I'm not going to go into the politics here for obvious reasons, but some people ended up on so called "fibre to the node" with copper links at the end that are too long for the service to work at any sort of speed. It's worse in rural areas. You would not think that Australia would be number 72 in the world for internet speeds!

In the UK, "fibre to the node" is called Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) and which requires a VDSL2 modem. I had this for several years and achieved downstream speeds of around 50-60 Mbps (the run from my house to the cabinet is around 900m, but the cabling was a mix of copper and aluminium which is not great).

The maximum speed for FTTC/VDSL2 is 76mpbs, but a new standard, known as G.Fast, was being tested that would support up to 300mpbs. However, the UK government told the Openreach (the network operator) to stop the deployment and focus on 1Gbps capable Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) connections.

 

[Martin]

I switched to VoIP (Vonage and later Ooma) over 15 years ago. I’ve had mobiles for 25+ years. A couple of years ago, after recognizing 90% of the calls on our VoIP were spam, we shut off our “landline” and have not looked back. Automated spam call blockers on mobiles are getting better and better to the point now where I only receive one or two spam calls a week. I love technology.

I work in the telecommunications field and our focus 23 years ago was moving our customers to VoIP and to SIP for the last 13. We strive for 99.9999% uptime (about 31.5 seconds down per year) and guarantee 99.999% (about 5 minutes 15 seconds out of service). I’d guess my mobile is providing even better than that. Yes there are places in the world that don’t have service but those are disappearing.

If you require global telecommunications without any dead spots buy a satellite phone and stay above ground.

Martin

 

[Berwhale]

Berwhale, you'll have to forgive me, but all that sounds like a tremendous headache for the typical person, and for what benefit?

You know a lot about this stuff no doubt, if I know 25% as much (likely an overestimate) then it'll take quite some time and energy to change over. If the typical person knows 1% as much, I do not see the obvious benefits of fibre based VOIP landlines to the vast majority of people.

Even if they are better, they seem much more complicated and it looks like providers want to tie you into their service, by not providing proper credentials, only pre-set routers and such (not a problem with a copper landline).

Indeed it is, and I did all this under COVID lockdown when I was completely reliant on my home broadband for work!

To be fair to BT, their solution, where your existing handset is plugged into their new router is designed to make the transition easier for the 'average joe'. My issue is that I don't want to use BTs router (I had a much Asus one at the time), I don't wanted to be tied to them for a phone service and they cost too much!

 

[Digby]

I work in the telecommunications field and our focus 23 years ago was moving our customers to VoIP and to SIP for the last 13. We strive for 99.9999% uptime (about 31.5 seconds down per year) and guarantee 99.999% (about 5 minutes 15 seconds out of service). I’d guess my mobile is providing even better than that.

Your mobile is better than this? I had one provider down for about 5 days straight, no 2g calls or anything, some months back (what is that, 1.3% downtime?). Another, completely different network provider, has been playing up for 2 days or so (0.5% downtime). These are only the big problems that I have noticed, I'm sure there are others have passed me by or I forgot about.

Maybe it is different in the US, but there seems to be little to no expectation of reliable mobile service, where coverage is available, within the UK. The benefit of a mobile phone is that you can take it with you. The downside is it the network will work (or be available) as and when it pleases.

 

[Prana Ferox]

At least in the US, after a few "this random datacenter went down and towns three states away lost 911" news stories, there is a lot more attention on getting the IP-based services back to the 'never goes down' level people expect. 'Moving to the cloud' from the municipal perspective was seen as a cost saving (all that analog land line infrastructure, local 911 operators etc was fantastically expensive) and so a lot of localities chose cheaper, less reliable services. The Internet was built to survive a nuclear war, the robust infrastructure is there, but you get what you pay for.

Cell services are even more aggressively cost-driven (which it has to be, or most areas wouldn't have service at all) but text is already classified as an emergency service (again, in USA, dunno elsewhere) and is very robust, and you are very likely to have voice service even if data has been disabled

 

[Martin]

Your mobile is better than this? I had one provider down for about 5 days straight, no 2g calls or anything, some months back (what is that, 1.3% downtime?). Another, completely different network provider, has been playing up for 2 days or so (0.5% downtime). These are only the big problems that I have noticed, I'm sure there are others have passed me by or I forgot about.

Maybe it is different in the US, but there seems to be little to no expectation of reliable mobile service, where coverage is available, within the UK. The benefit of a mobile phone is that you can take it with you. The downside is it the network will work (or be available) as and when it pleases.

That’s horrible. I’ve had intermittent issues in large cities with busy cell towers and outages at home after hurricane Ian but other than those my mobile service has been rock solid nationwide.

 

[JayGilb]

I live a tiny town (pop 1000) and I was able to get GByte fiber about 3 years ago. We kept our landline and it was switched over to VOIP with a battery backup.
We're the last of the dinosaur generation still using landlines, our children have always been cell only.

 

[Digby]

That’s horrible.

I'd go further and say it was dangerous. I'm fine, as I have multiple sims and ways of contacting people, but if everything goes over mobile or VOIP, what of the elderly, non-tech savvy person who is left without contact to the outside world, because uptime is taken as a privilege, rather than a given?

 

[BenjaminB]

I don't understand the ins and outs of what provides mobile coverage, but I presume it is generally an antenna in some vantage point somewhere.

a) i think you misunderstand my point, in that I can have previously excellent coverage in one location and then there is a fault that causes no signal or very poor signal (some problem with a local antenna?). AFAICS that will always be a problem with mobile coverage, unless more (fallback?) antennas are put up to provide coverage when there are problems? I imagine providers are loathe to do this, because of costs.

b) Also, am I correct in imagining there is some kind of standard for how 'available' a landline should be which either doesn't exist for mobile phone operators or is easily dodged when things go awry?

well well, should we really be conservative at this forum?
Things were not better before, in fact it was much worse.

so to your issues:
a) Nooo I do not misunderstand. Of course radio signal varies, it can be shadowed, damped, fading (in itself a scientific area) but all in all, general coverage is very good in most countries. More antennas/ base stations may help, but may will also increase interference level - not B/W at all. If you have problems - different mobiles have different receivers sensitivity, if ypu want to ensure really good reception get an external antenna. And select the mobile operator with best coverage in your area - it is possible to look up where base stations are, the operators coverage maps is a good guideline.
Latest mobile generations use advanced antennas, active and beamforming.

b) Mmm, yes there is actually a theoretical background developed for circuit switched networks. "Availability" is measured in Erlang (actually not exactly availability but connected to) and telephone operators used that for planning capacity of the (circuit switched) networks. Not really useful for in-deterministic networks (as IP networks) or mobile networks (independent if these are based on circuit switched or not).
In normal terms availability in the old telephone systems was around 0.9999-0.99999 %, whereas in typical mobile networks it is most often 0.96 - 0.99 %. As most modern mobile phones does handle let's say 2G+3G+4G+5G then the total availability is very high. Still ... no technical system gives 100% garantuee.

In some posts it has been mentioned that optical fibers, routers etc is powered from the powered network. If that is really a worry - get a battery backup. Having both fiber and mobiles gives much better security than the old telephone network - in most countries operators are required to equip base stations with a battery back-up lasting several hours.

The packet switched networks (IP networks is one such) are much more reliable, more cost effective, gives higher bandwidth ("data rate") and offer more services than the old circuit switched networks. It is much better today than it was 10-20-30-xx years ago.

 

[Digby]

a) Nooo I do not misunderstand. Of course radio signal varies, it can be shadowed, damped, fading (in itself a scientific area) but all in all, general coverage is very good in most countries. More antennas/ base stations may help, but may will also increase interference level - not B/W at all.

I'm sorry, but you do. I'm not talking about coverage, I'm talking about faults with the network (whatever they be) that stop any coverage from happening in an area that was covered. I don't know what it is like in your country, but these faults are a not insignificant problem in the UK. There is nothing that can be done at the consumer end to fix these issues, it is a problem with the network itself (you check on the provider's website and they will tell you there is a problem in x area and it will be fixed "soon").

 

[Digby]

In normal terms availability in the old telephone systems was around 0.9999-0.99999 %, whereas in typical mobile networks it is most often 0.96 - 0.99 %. As most modern mobile phones does handle let's say 2G+3G+4G+5G then the total availability is very high. Still ... no technical system gives 100% garantuee.

That is quite a large difference between mobile phone availability and landline ability, especially if the reliable system (landlines) are being shutdown or turned over the VOIP equipment, that may be reliant on a 3rd party internet provider, rather than just the local telephone exchange.

 

[JeffS7444]

Yes I think there's something to be said in favor of certain older technologies including POTS, AM and ham radio. Nothing wrong with FM or digital radio broadcasts per se, but they are harder to receive over long distances.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I gave up a landline like 14 or 15 years ago. Never really been a problem. Yes, in some ways the mobile is a bit less reliable. OTOH, I can take it with me and it does other things. I don't miss the landline as I could get one again obviously. The trade-offs seem worth it. If you don't have the choice anymore, then nothing to fret over as you are getting upset about something you cannot change.

 

[BenjaminB]

Yes I think there's something to be said in favor of certain older technologies including POTS, AM and ham radio. Nothing wrong with FM or digital radio broadcasts per se, but they are harder to receive over long distances.

No, that is actually not the case! eg most broadcast FM as well as digital broadcast have been designed to have limited range, ie output power has been limited. It is easily possible to increase radio range for these.
Early broadcast systems (most using AM as that is the easiest technology) had to cover large areas for cost reasons. When demand for higher audio quality paired with demands for more content (news, music, ...) then the obvious solution was to use smaller cells, ie lower output power. FM was introduced to increase audio quality. Another step was to move up in radio frequency from LW, MW and shortwave to what now is main frequency range around 100 MHz - which also has the benefit of nicely damping radio waves resulting in "small cells" (typical radius 10-100 km).

Ham radio is a completely different animal. Narrowband shortwave, which is best suited for morse coding ... Combining shortwave and narrow frequency band then it easy to reach far, but bandwidth/data rate/../ will be limited.

POTS are actually expensive due to the need to deploy all the wire as well as power inefficient. Some of these costs were investements done 50+ years ago. The wires are aging ... if POTS should be continued then the wired networks would have to be renewed, which would be even more expensive than optical fibres. POTS (xDSL is not POTS) does have very limited bandwidth and very limited service offering.

It is surprising to me that on a forum like this - ASR - there are so many who want to stick to old, outdated technologies which does have inferior qualities.

 

[Snoopy]

I thought landlines are a thing of the past already and everybody is doing VoIP calls.

 

[antcollinet]

Thanks to the last Australian government, we have HFC for our internet connection, shared through the block, and if power goes down we're out. I'm not going to go into the politics here for obvious reasons, but some people ended up on so called "fibre to the node" with copper links at the end that are too long for the service to work at any sort of speed. It's worse in rural areas. You would not think that Australia would be number 72 in the world for internet speeds!

I would - a relatively sparse population makes it much more expensive to run new fibre per person.

Here in the UK we have pretty good coverage in most areas, but if you live in some rural locations (about 5% of the population) you are SOL.

 

[antcollinet]

In our house we have currently reliable (fibre to the cabinet, copper from there to the house) internet.

We have a mobile phone each, each with a different providers.

We actually only keep a landline phone connected because some elderly relatives call us on it, and that had dropped from 3 to 2 now my mother is unable to call. The chances of the internet and both mobiles failing at the same time is slim to non existent outside a societal collapse. And then we'll have other worries.

 

[antcollinet]

but all that sounds like a tremendous headache for the typical person, and for what benefit?

Obviously the benefit is not direct to the customer. It is an infrastructure benefit.

My internet is provided by FTTC (Fibre to the cabinet). I have a copper connection to the cabinet, then my internet is fibre based from there. But I still have a dedicated (my line) copper connection from the cabinet to the exchange. This is incredibly wasteful - two parallel connections that must be maintained.

And our (UK) copper infrastructure is ancient - amongst the oldest in the world. It will become increasingly expensive to maintain as old cables have to be ripped out and replaced. Those costs would have to be passed on to the customer. The elimination of those costs is where you get your benefit.

A new fibre based network should (at least has the potential) be much more reliable than our aging copper systems.