Posted By: borpinThe exchanges do have limited backup power.

Indeed, and when, eventually, that fails your copper wires won't work, either.

When I lived in Tongue I had a fault on my phone line. The Openreach chap couldn't find the problem at my end so went to the exchange to test there. I asked if I could come and have a look. Bit surprised but, yeah, OK, so long as I drove my own van as their vans weren't insured to carry non-BT people. Quite interesting poke around. It was a few years ago but my vague recollection was that it was batteries + a generator and I think he said the batteries would normally cover it if the generator failed to start until somebody got to the quite rural location (at least 10 km of single track roads in any direction to/from the village) to sort it.

Anyway, what I do remember is that he said that all of the equipment, both for voice calls and internet connections, was powered as long as they had power available. I was a bit surprised they didn't prioritise voice then.

Mobile masts often have some backup power I believe, but that is often limited.

Yes, in the recent cuts here one of the local masts was emergency calls only, presumably not having backup power for enough equipment to do a full service.

From The Telegraph (paywall, sorry) - BT put VOIP plan on hold. Presumably this is Openreach not BT and I cannot find a press release from either.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/bt-halts-removal-landline-phones-vulnerable-unable-call-999/

Posted By: WillInAberdeenThey're also going to "work on getting better back-up solutions in place for when things disrupt the service like storms and power cuts" such as phones with batteries in them.

I remember those, the things before smart phones where batteries used to last a week or more and you made phone calls with them? But nobody uses phone calls now, they all use WhatsApp or a chatbot to find out why the power is off :(

many people keep a small battery backup plugged into their ONT and router to keep them going through a power cut, like this:

https://m.aliexpress.com/item/1005002588945424.html" rel="nofollow" >https://m.aliexpress.com/item/1005002588945424.html
"12V 15600mah Mini Dc Ups £37.83"

I believe BT/Openreach offer a branded product for the purpose. It seems a bit odd that it claims to be "Hottest Selling" but only has 7 sales?

Wondered if similar (or 5V version) would appeal to the RPi users of the forum?

If it was sold through a UK-based pi specialist, maybe. (UK terms of sale and warranties)

Posted By: WillInAberdeen(Or try https://thepihut.com/pages/search-results?q=ups )

Hmm, it sources code from 21 different domains. So sadly unusable IMHO. But thanks for the link.

All of my core network gear is on a couple of APC 750 with new batteries from CPC-Farnell.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/APC-SUA750I-Smart-UPS-750VA-USB-Serial-230V-without-Batteries-/224906437670 - £40 is about the right price (some really crazy prices on eBay).

https://cpc.farnell.com/leoch/lp12-7-0s/battery-lead-acid-agm-12v-7ah/dp/BT06381

Just check it has the actual connections for the battery included.

Posted By: borpinAll of my core network gear is on a couple of APC 750 with new batteries from CPC-Farnell..... Lead acid 12V 7Ah

Some of the South African folks were using 240V inverter UPSs like that, but were finding they only got them through brief power cuts. How long do you find yours runs for?

Limitations were reportedly from the limited discharge characteristics of the internal lead acid 12V battery, with the losses of inverting the 12V battery up to 240V AC then rectifying it back down to 12V for the router/ONT/VoIPphone. The router itself presumably converts down to 3.3V or 1.8V or whatever its IC runs on.

Some had doctored those UPSs to cable the battery terminals out to external 100+Ah leisure batteries. Others were running the router and phone directly off a leisure battery, either with or without a 12V DC converter to protect the router from messy charging voltages. If the power was out for a long time, they could recharge their leisure battery from their car or with a solar panel, all borrowed from the caravan industry.

In a more limited way, our 4G Internet router has an unlimited data SIM card which we can swap into a mobile phone, recharging that from the car, so we can sustain Internet/VoIP/WhatsApp/Netflix through an extended power cut, or a camping holiday. Never needed to yet!

I've lost track of precisely what this thread is about, but phones and internet and wires seem to come into it!

FWIW we had the new internet-only system installed yesterday, and a few interesting facts emerged while talking to the very helpful engineer:

1) All internet connections now are fibre right to the house. The kind that only had fibre to a big box in the village and then ordinary wires to each house is old-fashioned. Our fibre comes right into the house down a cable that is only slightly fatter than the old copper wires.

2) The old (and very expensive) fibre right to the house needed a huge box in the living room. That's gone now too. Our cable terminates at a box on the outside wall about the size of a paperback, and another socket inside the size of an old phone master socket. There was no installation charge.

3) Old phones still work exactly as before. They plug into the special socket in the back of the modem, or hub as they now call it. Filters are out of date too. The system now works without the need for filters.

4) We have a network of phone sockets in places around the house, some of which we have old phones plugged into. There is an antique master bell in the kitchen, all the other phones having their ringers/bells turned off. The bell can be heard throughout the house, and outside to some extent. (We also used to have an external bell that could be heard a mile away - we ditched that as pointless)
None of this needed any modification. One connection plugged into the hub and the entire system works exactly as before. Even the old bell rings in exactly the same way.

5)Tthere are also two free cordless handsets, which do additional marvelous things I haven't investigated yet. But I like old phones, even old black ones with proper dials sometimes.
And it all still works!


The only drawback is of course that it won't work during power cuts or if the internet is down.

Cliff Pope said: "1) All internet connections now are fibre right to the house."

I think that depends on where you live. I believe BT/Openreach will stop selling analogue products everywhere in Sept next year. There's a list of 118 exchanges where they have already stopped (and there may be more since the list was published - I don't know) at https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/05/openreach-to-stop-selling-copper-phone-in-118-areas-go-fttp.html

Thanks for the feedback Cliff,

If you want, it doesn't have to stop working during power cuts (see the many previous posts about battery boxes), or when the internet connection is down (certain providers now include a 4G/5G sim in their router to provide 'unbreakable internet' (sic))

Posted By: Cliff PopeI think you are being a bit pedantic. I am using "internet" to mean the internet to my house.

Yes, of course, I was being a bit jokey spelling things out. But my point is that the voice telephone service you get, though going over internet technology, is still independent of the internet at your ISP (probably even if your ISP is BT). Give or take failure of your ONT your phone service will be exactly as vulnerable as that of your neighbour who's still on a copper pair with no internet connection.

This is unlike the case for people (like me) who use a completely independent VoIP provider.

Link

https://www.draytek.co.uk/information/blog/the-end-of-analogue-phone-lines-pt1

That page borpin links above says:

Devices which will no longer work in the UK include:

EPoS machines (Credit card machines and sales registers) - Estimated 500,000 still in use

Personal safety devices. Used with vulnerable persons, fall alarms etc - Estimated 1 million still in use

Intruder & fire alarms

Traffic light systems & other industrial monitoring

Dialysis machines and other medical systems

Payphones (these are most likely to still work on a VoIP line but billing signalling may not)

Fax machines.…

I don't understand this. If you plug any of these analog phone devices into the phone (TEL) socket of the ONT I can't see why they wouldn't work just as they do now (or maybe a little better [¹]). Presumably tone dialling will continue to work (like it does on the ATA for my VoIP service). OK, the signal gets digitised in the ONT but (almost?) all calls are digitised at the exchange now anyway.

[¹] I say “a little better” because the digitizing will happen a bit closer to the source device.

A lot of them are supposed to keep working during power cuts? Plus I've also seen stuff saying that fax requires more bandwidth than VOIP circuits usually provide and that packet loss and delays are problematic. How much is real and how much is FUD I have no idea.

FWIW, my phone base station is apparently able to use t'internet to make calls (it says Siemens on it; I gather its younger siblings say Gigaset). My router (a Fritz!Box 7530) is apparently able to interface to Dect phones such as my handsets. I've never tried either possibility but I expect I will in the next few years. My router also includes the possibility of connecting fax machines on its telephony pages. And it allows to set different signalling conventions for different countries. It all sounds complicated!

edit: crossed with Will's post.

Also I'd be interested to know what people in the City do or are going to do. When I worked there people used direct copper connections. Actual wires from the source to the destination, not switched in an exchange. I wonder what they do now?

Traditional Fax

https://www.3cx.com/pbx/fax-voip/

I suspect a lot of these other devices have similar limitations. It could be linked to the compression used in VOIP.

Posted By: Ed DaviesDoesn't this all depend on what VoIP codecs BT choose to use internally? If they stick with the digitization scheme they currently use for ATM then

They won't I don't think. The point of ISDN was a guaranteed 64 kbps bandwidth per channel so there was no point in trying to compress any more, whereas now there's an obvious competitive reason to compress the skull out of everything to get as many subscribers/calls down one fibre as possible.

But BT's codecs now are irrelevant unless you happen to use BT as your ISP. And even then they have to follow standards to work with whoever the other end's ISP is. Internally it's all just bits in a pipe. There are no protocol changes internally.

Brian's link about the T.38 protocol is quite interesting. It's an obvious-in-retrospect-but-not-so-obvious-in-advance idea IMHO.