Openreach reveals latest locations facing the copper chop BT infrastructure arm Openreach has disclosed the latest exchange locations where it plans to stop selling phone and broadband services that use copper cabling as part of its ambition to get everyone on fiber. The business says it is giving telcos which use its network – such as Sky, TalkTalk, and Vodafone – a year's notice …
The newer ones make good cheap access points if you don’t need the latest speeds.
Disable dhcp server, set a fixed up, set SSID and password to your existing ones and put it in a different channel. Some thick tape over the no broadband light and plug it into your network.
I wonder about power cuts too. With the POTS/Cu system, the exchanges have batteries that can last a few days. With VOIP, all blinkenlightenboxen on the way will need some sort of backup. And factor in: if the grid system operator can't connect by network to a generator, the current solution is to phone them up. In a black-start scenario that may prove an issue.
My parents have a normal copper phone line and broadband on fibre from one of the regional rural providers who use their own fibre. When they were getting a new landline phone contract recently they called BT and asked for a quote. Bloke on the other end says we can do your broadband too and sends a quote for full fibre along with the phone. Being a suspicious old git and before I let them sign any contract, I used the postcode checker on Openreach website ( https://www.openreach.com/fibre-checker/ultrafast-full-fibre-broadband Low and behold it says
“Not yet available”
so I called BT and asked it what happens with their phone line based panic alarm (which is an insurance requirement) if they get fibre? Bloke says they need to talk to their provider of this alarm oh and must invest in a battery backup (UPS) in case the power (as it occasionally does) goes out. Okay, so follow up question to that, how do they intended to offer this full fibre to my folks house given what Openreach are saying. Bloke eventually admits that there isn’t Openreach fibre in the village and they therefore can’t offer fibre at this time. I will get them a UPS when the time comes but there is a lousy to non existent mobile signal (on all networks) inside the house so the suggestion to just use that instead in an emergency is hardly going to work.
Plusnet did this to me.
Said I could have fibre even though I knew we couldn't get fibre, as I'd spoken to Openreach engineers installing fibre nearby, and they'd told me they had no intention of extending the fibre to reach the group of houses where I lived at the time.
Where I live now we only had the option of full fibre, so no landline, and a woeful mobile signal, so if the internet goes, I need to walk to the end of the road where there's a bit of mobile signal to make calls.
In my rural location when the power fails, which is not uncommon here, the mobile drops down to 2G or whatever the lowest power mode is but at least it seems to have a UPS.
The power lines are constantly interrurpted by trees touching them in the winter wind after summer growth which I assume trips out local relay stations.
Anyway the point is, the grid in the countryside is nowhere near capable of supporting EV or even local generation. We had the connversation with the power supplier about local generation and the grid can't support significant feed in. There must be lots of rural locations (probably towns too) that are a million miles from 100% EV support capability.
So, the conclusion, as there is no trillion pound project to upgrade the country, is that we will become house bound in order to meet NetZero or worse ... options include no power and left to starve, sent to fight some senseless war that no one wants, moved to city prisons, culled by pharmaceuticals, hit by a meteor we haven't been told about, nuked or ... politicians are utter lying gits and are milking us using NetZero BS. Let's hope it's the latter!
HAH!
feckin hilarious.
As I've said here before, I live less than 100 yards from a fibre "hub", but since the postcode has 4 residential addresses, and 1 business address we are probably the last post-code on OutBleach's list.
Despite being less than 3 miles from a city centre, we're over a mile from the 2 nearest copper boxes too, so "wired broadband" is useless (BT customer operative actually recommended that we move if we wanted operational broadband...). Fortunately we're close enough to a couple of masts that we get usable 4G connectivity.
I don't actually expect to get FTTP at all.
4G? Looxury! I get 2G using phone semaphore if I'm lucky ...
Thinking about it, it's actually quicker and more reliable to use real semaphore to send a confirmation text to someone on the other side of the site than to use a phone signal ... I was half way home when I got a 4-hour-old text from a colleague the other day!
I'd settle for 'any' G in Oxford City centre on EE.
https://community.ee.co.uk/t5/Mobile-Network-discussions/Coverage-in-Oxford/m-p/1399453#M35223
Been without proper service for about a year now.
As for FTTP in Oxford...I'll believe it when I see it. Its been poor and degrading for years in parts of the city. Often with no options to switch.
How the whole "a telephone line is a public good" thing has been just waved away. Nobody has really made a fuss (well, they have, but the PPE grads in the MSM don't even know what POTS is) but, when the next big wind knocks down a few pylons, or a goodly thunderstorm trips out the inverters on a big wind farm, you will have no telephone service at all:
Remember how they used to recommend that you had an old-fashioned wired telephone, so you would still have service in a power cut when your DECT phone stopped working?
Well, now, there's minimal battery backup to the fibre cabinet, and unless you are "vulnerable", your local telephone connection has no power. The mobile network will only stay up as long as the battery in your base-station allows - the operators are baulking at ensuring 4 hours, so presumably it's less than that now.
In a couple of years, you will have no way of contacting anyone you can't shout at after no more than an hour or so of power outage. What happens when the crims work this out?
Of course what should have happened is mandating a power pair be laid in with each fibre connection, and a power link from the exchange to each cabinet - with the option to run the system in low-power, slow mode to extend the life of the big generator in the exchange building. But that would require money, and the inability of BT/Openreach to sell off all their old telephone exchanges!
At least my mobile has the ability to call for help via satellite when there is no mobile signal or WiFi.
I've got enough battery power to keep my ONT and router running for at least four hours (more if I move a UPS), but most won't :-( Came in handy during the Euros when the power went out and the street was desperate to watch the England match!
If it took an event like that to produce a power cut round here we'd be quite pleased with the service.
Sounds like where I live. My single phase mains supply, 'maintained' by SSE, suffers from almost daily brown-outs and at least once a month it drops out completely for a second or two. Every few months it goes out completely for ten to twenty minutes. We never get an apology or even an explanation as to why, let alone any kind of compensation.
I've got a couple of compact UPSes that can hold up the ISP's VDSL SIP/DECT/FSX router, my gateway router/access-point and my file/mail server for a couple of hours but everything else has to rely on residual capacitance in the power supply circuits to ride out the ripples and shut down for the longer events.
Oddly my partner who lives less than a kilometre away has a far more stable service to her house from the very obvious and noisy 1.8MW substation at the other end of her street whereas I seem to be directly connected to the larger 10MW facility at the edge of town. (At least I think so as I can't find any smaller substations closer to me.)
Anyway, when telephone providers remove POTS, they should be obliged to offer a free UPS to keep at least one FSX port active for twenty-four hours or so. Either that or a serious cut in the cost of the service as a result of the reduced SLA.
They already offer AA-powered "UPSes" for their ONTs on fibre networks, you just need to be someone who has a reason to need one like an alarm pendant or a disability etc. Those should last for about 4 hours.
I happen to have one because with some of their rollouts in some areas they put them in every install, but then some beancounter decided it was too expensive and you can now only get them on application.
Otherwise their solution is to "use the mobile phone network" but the chances of that staying up for longer than 4 hours in a complete outage are pretty remote I'd imagine.
well - there’s already copper pair to each home so no need to lay it. But the costs of maintaining that copper infrastructure just for power delivery (or even for “everything that isn’t fibre broadband”) exceed the benefit given that most of us only want fibre broadband from our fixed-line suppliers.
My smartphone battery lasts all day - so as long as one of the nearby cell-sites stays up I can contact emergency services just fine. Heck, if I walk out into my garden I can do so by satellite.
When I was a kid the post came twice a day. But no longer. The world moves on.
Incidentally you could probably even deliver a few watts of power over fibre if you really wanted to (modulo finding a point downstream of any PON split where power and battery were available - I’m not sure whether OpenReach co-locate their PON splitters with their legacy cabinets, or whether they connectorise things there or just splice - and of course issues of cost, power efficiency, safety etc.)
> well - there’s already copper pair to each home so no need to lay it.
Not any more. I live in a new build estate (2016-18 build dates) and all houses have solely fibre. I suspect all other new builds equipped with fibre won't also have copper lines laid.
"with the option to run the system in low-power, slow mode to extend the life of the big generator in the exchange building"
Are you suggesting we bring back Strowger exchanges? You could run one of them off a car battery for weeks.
If those Strowger racks are still in place in BT/Openretch's exchanges (and it's a fair bet they are), there's a straightforward rollback option.
I thought I lived in the outback of Wales! But Llanbrynmair makes my 'village' look like a Metropolis!
There seems to be less than 40 properties in Llanbrynmair, which is probably why Openwretch have picked it as the first place that they are going to complete full fibre rollout into!
James Lilley, Openreach's Managed Customer Migrations Manager, defended the company's decision.
"As copper's ability to support modern communications declines, the immediate focus is getting people onto newer, future-proofed technologies."
Copper's ability to maintain basic communications, OTOH, is underpassed. In the event of a power failure the newer technologies aren't even present-proofed. There's no way of holding this smug git typical BT manager to account.
Fat chance of that - mine was announced 4 years ago "by December 2026" now just says "not yet available"
Though I'm sure once nexfibre start cutting into their prospective customer base (or the die off of the local older population alters the dynamics) then I'm sure Openreach will "suddenly" announce a build and throw the kitchen sink at it to try and beat nexfibre to the punch. Their gamifying the system by announcing vast areas and then forgetting about it them so customers can't use govt schemes for those "not included in the openreach rollout" is beyond sad and pathetic
the install for my parents. Was with an independant ISP on crappy old ADSL. Looked at fibre because the ADSL had become so unreliable. Asked the ISP who said fibre was available for my parents bungalow. Asked them if they were sure as NO ONE has ever dug up the drive and laid fibre. They said "yes, Openreach wouldn't recommend it if it wasn't available." So went along with the order. Engineer came out and said "Yeah, there is no fibre. We'd have to dig up the long shared drive to lay it to get it to your house". So I contacted the ISP to cancel it. We weren't going to be able to afford to pay for the drive being dug up.
The ISP jumped in and said "But you don't understand. Openreach have said they'll pay for it all because copper is getting switched off and because they could then get a potential sale for the other two houses down the drive applying for fibre". So I said fine, go ahead. Then had the pain of having to get all 3 houses to agree and send their forms back, which they did. The big house got paid for "inconvience" but Openreach (we know as helped him fill in his form. They were pleased as they wanted fibre as well)
Diggers turned up months later and started the dig. Nice foot wide trench up the drive to the two houses (For some reason I thought the trench would be wider), the 3rd turns out has a phone pole in their garden which will provide their fibre. That house popped out and asked if they wouldn't mind filling in the pot holes at the end of the drive while at it. They said "If you supply us with tea all day then sure". And they did! Completed it in a day.
Then Openreach said "Fibre was installed" so ISP informed me. I went round to check and said "Unless they used some magic invisible fibre then no, they haven't installed it. The draw string is still there and they haven't even installed the ONT yet". Openreach made a mistake there, came out and did that bit.
Been fine since the install.
All this talk of battery backups, and what happens to the vulnerable when the power goes out, is missing the point.
Even if you could phone the emergency services, the ambulances won’t get there for 8 hours, the police will be too busy on other more serious crimes and the fire services won’t be needed as there’s no risk of fires starting anyway, as no power for electrical faults, no power for electric cookers/microwaves/ovens/toasters tc., and no power for lighting to find your matches to light a ciggie. With regards panic alarms, again no point, as the risk assessments by social services will mean their staff cannot go out during a power cut.
(Ironic post, btw, for the hard of humour)
This post has been deleted by its author
"Why don't all of the fibre modems have space to put in a few rechargeable batteries for those who need some UPS capability?"
You mean the ONT (it's not a modem)? Openreach initially provided (some?) ONTs with battery backup but they no longer do so by default.
However even with that you'd still need other equipment (router? AP? VOIP adaptor?) to have battery backup in order to use the fibre connection...
An old boss of mine lived in a nice cottage which had some massive warehouses built behind it - the warehouses got fibre under the main road outside his house installed but it ran about 20M away from his house and the company putting it in refused to talk to him about getting a residential connection on it. Can only assume it was all "dark fibre" rather than consumer ISP grade stuff.
My whole town and surrounding area are all covered by both OpenReach FTTP as well as BRSK FTTP.
Well, I say my whole town, my whole town APART FROM MY STREET.
My street of 10 houses is surrounded by woodlands - and even though we have both BT and BRSK fibre poles at the end of our street - neither of them seem willing to actually serve our street.
Quite frustrating - and not sure what we will do if they switch of the old network. Currently got G-Fast with 150mbps down and 16mbps up - which isn't bad but nowhere near as good as the 2gbps up and down that are available on next street across.
It's possible that they can't see high enough demand to justify the cost. My mother in law lived on a street of miserable bastards in a major suburb of London and it was the only street for miles around that couldn't get anything above ADSL...when I spoke to the various ISPs serving other streets, they said it was due to low or zero demand...there were flyers dropping through her door on a regular basis to register interest, but her neighbours wouldn't do it because they were part of the "my connection is fine" crowd...when the pandemic kicked off, all of them and I mean *all* of them were moaning about how shit the broadband was on the street and wondering why.
When I was house hunting I found a pretty reliable way to know if a street was going to be wired up for decent broadband, I essentially just checked the local speedtest results on the speedtest map, but instead of focusing on the actual speeds, I looked at the networks the speedtests came from...if I saw a load of TalkTalk, Plusnet and other cheapo ISPs with low speed test scores, I could be pretty confident that street was generally going to be problematic with broadband...I'd also ask the estate agents about broadband on the street and if they went no further than saying "broadband is available" or they were generally cagey about it, I'd know it was cack.
People need to wake up and realise that broadband availability actually has a massive impact on the value of your house and/or your ability to sell it quickly.
"Why am I looking when I already have 500 up and 500 down from Go-Fibre?"
If better speeds exist, why wouldn't you want it?
I have a wife and 3 kids, plus the MIL is here most days and we're on 1gig down / 100 up...you'd be surprised how quickly you can use large amounts of bandwidth...you can get away with much lower speeds, but bear in mind, for lower speeds to work a lot of the services (which you pay subscriptions for) will operate at lower bitrates etc...they will appear to work "just fine"...but you aren't getting what you're paying for because the services can't operate at their full quality, especially if you're using the same service in parallel on lots of devices....you're probably ok on 500/500 but people out there on 200 or less are kidding themselves...if people pay for Netflix, Prime Video etc etc why would they not want those services to run in the best possible conditions?
I've been keeping up with the highest possible internet connection speed that I can since the mid 90s...it has always been worth the premium...I can't remember a single time where I woke up and regretted having the fastest possible internet connection...it's just not something that someone can feel stupid about...I know affordability is a factor for some (if you see broadband as a cost)...but even at top whack, a top tier internet connection costs less than a couple of takeaways and regardless of your internet connection speed, you can use the internet to save you money in various areas of your life, shopping around for better deals, reliably working from home (to save on the commute costs) etc etc...so essentially your internet can pay for itself...especially these days if you work from home...if your job has gone to fully or mostly remote...the money you're saving on your commute can more than pay for a top tier broadband connection.
It's pretty similar with other aspects of tech as well...I get that there are situations where some may think "well it's all I need, why pay more"....but that attitude really does my head in because pushing the boat out on tech can change your life significantly for the better...why cater to your existing life, when you can go that bit further and use the extra resource to improve your life?
Phrases like "It's all I need", "Good enough for me" etc etc come out of the same basket as "One day when I win the lottery"...they're defeatist excuses...they're phrases that allow you to justify something being shit and accepting it for no good reason.
I just tried the Openreach postcode checker linked to in the article, using some random-but-real postcodes. When selecting the exact address from the resulting drop-down menu, there were a bunch of residential and business addresses as expected.
What was NOT expected was a plethora of other types of address...
For example, an electricity substation, a cellular site, a bridleway etc... looks like an unfiltered list from some address database or other..
After checking the Openreach headquarters postcode of EC3V 0AT, it was nice to find the location and names of some of their internal comms cabinets:-) Go and have a look at the AO Arena in Manchester,. postcode M3 1AR. All sorts of info there if you have an inquiring mind, or if you are up to no good!
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