Yet another Hacker News

Landline phones will switch off across Britland in 100 days, no extensions

49 points edward 3 hours ago 30 comments

lelandfe 2 hours ago | parent

Finland a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786868

California's also been fighting this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/att-loses-key-ru...

Y_Y 1 hour ago | parent

> Anyone with concerns should contact their provider, but the responsibility cannot rest with customers alone.

Best of luck contacting your provider

kevTheDev 1 hour ago | parent

Where is Britland?

KaiserPro 1 hour ago | parent

UK, but its the register, who's headline comes from a long tradition of taking the piss out of/mirroring the use of, puns from uk tabloids.

grandfunction 58 minutes ago | parent

I did like "no extensions"

ButlerianJihad 26 minutes ago | parent

Quite the ringing endorsement. They’ve dialled-in the jargon whilst the Beeb insists on parroting the party line. It’s a real hang-up for some of us.

cpncrunch 24 minutes ago | parent

Never seen that word ever in my life. Bizarre to use such a ridiculously unknown word for such an important story. I was thinking where the fuck is britland? Must be somewhere in Scandinavia or Germany.

I mean, boffin: fine. Everyone in the UK knows what that means. But britland isn't a term that anyone in the UK has heard of. (Testing...)

xacky 1 hour ago | parent

It's still using the same cables if you're not using fttp. Just that the phone is connected through the router first.

LorenPechtel 30 minutes ago | parent

The question is reliability.

jordanb 1 hour ago | parent

An interesting component of the switching off of POTS is that the quality of service requirements are different. POTS is regulated to require the phone company to maintain a certain legal quality of service with negative consequences for failing to do so.

Meanwhile, cell phone and VOIP services are "best effort."

The phone company put a pretty huge amount of effort into maintaining QoS (Lily Tomlin jokes aside) because there were consequences for not doing so. It makes sense that they would prefer to shed that responsibility.

lokar 1 hour ago | parent

That’s too bad, in California it’s all the same:

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/internet-and-p...

dhosek 1 hour ago | parent

“Best efforts” is a legal term. Its definition can vary from state to state, but it is not just, “oh we tried, sorry, lol” and it defines the highest standard of implementation in all jurisdictions.

marcindulak 46 minutes ago | parent

In some places in Europe, the home internet ADSL technology on the copper wires, the same as used for PSTN phones, delivers higher speed (realistically an order of a few Mbps, stable) compared to congested LTE/4G mobile networks (typical 1-3 Mbps). The mobile network providers don't guarantee minumim speeds in the contracts, and customers (typically older people) that move from ADSL to LTE/4G, are left with a degraded service without a possibility to object.

mistrial9 1 hour ago | parent

Internet services are the new walled city? -- be cast out at your own peril; suits the State just fine

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

It's not like it's banned, they're just not offering it any more. Feel free to make your own communication network.

jagged-chisel 1 hour ago | parent

> … public awareness seems low that analog phone services will soon be disconnected.

What’s the level of public awareness that they’re even using the landline service? My 98yo grandmother has had the “same” phone service (with the same phone number) for decades. She’s completely unaware of the infrastructure it runs on.

I happen to know that her area was converted to all fiber digital years ago, but she wouldn’t know that. Her children (my parents’ generation) are also clueless about the infrastructure itself.

So how many people know they’ll be affected even if they have been informed of the change?

gumby 1 hour ago | parent

The biggest problems is power. The phone company power the POTS line — you can even make an emergency call from an abandoned building with no electrical service (and no phone subscription) if you find a jack and plug in. Under those huge central office buildings are huge banks of -48 V batteries which are required to provide a week of power (or was it two in the US? I can’t remember).

Now you’ll have a router with a battery that the owner doesn’t know about and won’t service, so that within a year or so it won’t work. In an emergency: no phone service.

post-it 1 hour ago | parent

> Now you’ll have a router with a battery that the owner doesn’t know about and won’t service

In Canada, Bell has actually discontinued battery backup in their latest modems, supposedly because they were having trouble with modems not rebooting correctly.

kotaKat 1 hour ago | parent

Verizon forces me if I want battery backup for my ONT to provide 12 D cell batteries.

https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/battery-backup/p...

What a fuckin' joke.

toomuchtodo 58 minutes ago | parent

I think a solution to this is mandate providers provide a cellular interface for households for emergency response, with battery backup. Basically a mobile hotspot with a phone jack, speaker, microphone, and red button to call for help attached to a chonky batter pack. Device inventory and health is required to be reported to regulators.

This solves for power, and reporting means it’s trivial to log and audit if the devices are online and available for emergency service calls.

If a mobile tower isn’t available in the area, a tower must be made available for the sector coverage.

Anything else in a world of fiber to the home is compliance theater, as your example shows.

sethhochberg 45 minutes ago | parent

There's some sense in which I prefer this, though, because at least I know how to source D batteries and they're a commonly available standard and I know exactly what their shelf life is. I might even have spares around in my emergency kit for things like lanterns and radios. I've also seen Verizon battery backup units that run on small lead-acid batteries which seem to need frequent replacing, and require me to look up the details and order from a specialty vendor every time... more annoying to keep extras of those on hand and tough luck if it reaches end of life shortly before or during an emergency.

celtain 1 hour ago | parent

How many people still have a corded phone, and how many of those would remember that those phones still work when there's no power?

It's much more important to ensure that the cell network is resilient. Backup power, mobile towers that can be deployed to disaster areas, and continuing the rollout of satellite connectivity will help far more people than maintaining landline infrastructure.

esskay 1 hour ago | parent

You wont have a battery. In the UK they stopped providing a battery backup when they switched to the newer ONT quite a while ago, and routers typically do not include one either.

There are a few generic router battery backup products on the market but none specifically get advertised as working on the ONT, but many do. Realistically though they're utterly pointless when you can pick up a vastly superior APC UPS for the same price.

lakeviewterrace 47 minutes ago | parent

AT&T is using old people to market their new cellular-to-POTS bridge product.

The premise is she needs something as reliable as a landline, because during California wildfires the cell towers and power go down.

Maybe someone should have whispered to her that this product uses the same cell towers, or equally-vulnerable broadband. I could not stop laughing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud2LaFDEUho

Grombobulous 47 minutes ago | parent

This assumes that anyone has maintained the 48V infrastructure, which doesn’t seem like something that will be feasible considering the insignificant quantity of customers using true copper landline service.

The other problem with customers preferring not to have landlines is that by the time they need them, it’s too late to convince them to buy a traditional telephone and plug it in. You are likely to be nursing home age if you still prefer having a landline. You can have amazing infrastructure but if nobody uses it, it’s useless.

What we really have now is cellular sites with their own infrastructure aiming to keep them operational during power outages.

Then we’ve also got various satellite services that are growing in capabilities day by day, and are built in to common devices like iPhones as an SOS method.

I’m not in the UK but my house was built relatively recently and it doesn’t have any telephone jacks. The theoretical benefits of a landline are entirely theoretical. The ship has thoroughly sailed.

gumby 27 minutes ago | parent

You put the battery in the RC and have a battery maintenance schedule. They do that today: the CO battery is just for phones within a few miles of the CO, so rural setups use distributed batteries. Ppl forget how much of California is quite remote and (to my pleasure) without mobile coverage.

I have copper service (buried) for the alarm system in my house in Palo Alto, powered by the CO. I will be sorry to lose it.

The cell ppl so have batteries in the bis and ter nodes but not long term power like the phone company has to do.

Satellite bandwidth is quite limited and uses a lot of power. It’s not really a solution, especially with consumer terminals. It’s just a handwave to get away with not dealing with the problems.

Overall this is a step backwards on safety. Telecoms MAHA

wolfi1 1 hour ago | parent

most landlines in continental Europe are already VoIP

implements 47 minutes ago | parent

[Tip] If you decide to cut the cord but want to keep your number you can port it to Andrews & Arnold (a small ISP, based in Bracknell) as a £1.80 per month VOIP subscription.

julianlam 28 minutes ago | parent

Most voip providers should be able to do this, like voip.ms

mmooss 23 minutes ago | parent

> The company previously told The Register that customers without a fiber connection will likely be switched to SOTAP for Analog (Single Order Transitional Access Product), where equipment is installed in the local telephone exchange to allow them to continue to use their old phone line as before.

What does Single Order refer to? One purchase order at a time?