California's also been fighting this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/att-loses-key-ru...
Best of luck contacting your provider
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...)
So pretty much anyone for whom the news is relevant would understand the headline immediately.
It sounds like it was a successful title. Click obtained.
1. British people will get it. Jokey references to the country are common here.
2. People who are interested in these changes globally will want to read anyway
3. Regular Register readers will probably get it
4. Social media shares often add comment or being seen mostly by one of the three categories above
5. Search engine results might or might not show a snippet that clarifies.
6. Sharing the link in places that do not allow clarifying the headline is evidently a problem.
I bet that makes the BNP/UKIP/Blackshirts/Reform/Tories suitably angry.
And I imagine the Blackshirts, or whatever we're calling this current version of Nazi morons would think you meant it to suggest, as they believe, that "their" country has been overrun by foreigners.
† In Ireland a Unionist wants Ireland, at least part of it and in many cases all of it, to be "united" with Great Britain. Contrariwise Nationalists want all of Ireland to be a single uh, independent nation. These groupings correlate to varying degrees with which flavour of Christianity (if any) you practice, and with whether you want a Republic or Royalty. The trivial stereotypes would be a Protestant who wants the King of England to also rule the entire island of Ireland, and a Catholic who believes the entire island should be an independent Republic. One thing almost everybody appears to have agreed on is that murdering each other wasn't solving anything. So that's good.
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.
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/internet-and-p...
The clause acknowledges that success depends on variables nobody fully controls: market conditions, regulatory approvals, third-party cooperation. So instead of promising a result, the party promises effort of a particular quality. Courts then evaluate that effort after the fact, which is where things get complicated.
From https://fedlaws.org/best-efforts-standard-in-contracts-ucc-r...
...which will get even more congested as people continue to migrate to using a network designed for mobility for devices which don't even move.
Imagine thousands of devices, most of which never move, sharing one WiFi access point.
I don't think regulation is the answer, but maybe a "mobile networks are for mobility" awareness campaign might help fix this stupidity.
In some locations fiber connections are not available, the LTE/4G/5G is the only home internet connection that mobile companies offer. You don't know what speeds you get before you buy the specific provider service. Not many people will experiment with various providers or alternative technologies.
No phone signal of course.
However the service you're describing is not ADSL, in which the DSL endpoint is in the exchange where all of an area's copper cables met but instead VDSL where the nearby local cabinet processes the DSL signals and is itself provided with fibre.
With VDSL the copper cable is maybe moving your Internet 100 metres, with ADSL it might be several kilometres, and so ADSL can't do 30 down 8 up, the most it's going to try is something like 12 down 2 up.
Edited to add:
In principle you could imagine a technology which goes "Wait a minute, this is a direct exchange line and the exchange is one block from here, I'll try 100Mbps" but ADSL is not that technology. What we actually do is either put VDSL in the exchange and give these people VDSL or run actual fibre to them if it's perceived that they'd be willing to pay for faster Internet. A friend lives a short distance from our exchange and bleated for years about ADSL being all that was available until (this is years ago now) I got sick of it and made him fill out the precise line diagnostic and of course it says yes he can have VDSL. Beliefs can be sticky, he probably checked the very first time he whined about it, and then five years later he was still running off that no-longer true belief.
I’ve got some adsl speed at work in some location which are limited to under 8/1, which is fine as they are replacing isdn (which is also being turned off), service is sites. I assume it’s a similar technology to adsl.
From what I can tell, dsl of any type didn’t really take off in America.
VDSL was the core of the AT&T U-verse offerings in the US for a good decade perhaps a little more. This was marketed as a full cable replacement, as it included Internet, TV (including the normal cable channels), and optionally landline phone (over ip, but without some of the normal headaches of VOIP, as AT&T could treat this more like a digitized POTS line on their side, much like the normal pots lines they digitized behind the scenes). There were also some other smaller deployments here and there, but that seemed to be the biggest one in the US.
ADSL/ADSL2/ADSL2+ certainly did exist, but to work well you need to be relatively close to the local exchange, needed copper wires in good condition, etc. It was offered fairly widely, like by most companies offering phone service over copper lines, but because the quality could vary quite significantly depending on things not obvious to the purchaser, it tended to get a bad-rap. If you tried it once, but was unluck enough to have it not work well, you would write off the tech, and tell all your firends not to bother, and go go with the cable offering.
For me personally, in its heyday, ADSL2 beat cable hands down, as in that time frame cable was only using a tiny fraction of its bandwidth to provide internet service, and only a few feeds coming out of the local office, so the amount of oversubscription was insane, and amounted to basically fraud, as you could only ever get anywhere near your advertised speed at like 4 am.
Then cellphones and the Internet happened (as much as they fought it). Why invest in a dying industry? Now phones are used to send picture messages and get addicted to watching one short form video after another.
People value mobility and having one phone bill over toll quality voice. People get much more annoyed at "All circuits are busy. Please try again later." errors or 5 cents per minute than mushy call quality. Making phone calls from a car or walking on the street is always going to be noisier than at home.
In all of my decades I recall only one telephone outage one time, at home. A truck (or something) had snagged a line feeding the house. It was repaired less than an hour after reporting it.
And I'm nostalgic for that kind of reliability, but it's gone now.
I was chatting with a tech who was installing a new county 911 system a few weeks ago. There was a time, not so long ago, when 911 had been robust: Fixed circuits to multiple different areas (to walk around network issues). Slow, redundant, robust analog modems on leased lines for caller data and call control. Eventually, things like PRI or T1.
Either way, there were great racks of redundant gear at the 911 PSAP for managing calls.
But now? It's just VOIP over the public Internet. 911 calls get the same not-special class of service that posting this comment does. The huge gear-filled racks are gone. In their place is a router and a switch, and a collection of dispatch PCs.
(There's a backup IP connection, of course. This backup connection uses cellular data.)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/telecomarchaeology/posts/354...
This just doesn't look like something that will work wonderfully for 80+ years.
I haven't ever gotten into it myself, but I had a DSL connection that would go wonky on sunny evenings due to an increase in reception of a nearby AM radio transmitter that drowned out the useful signals. (Amusingly, the hardware on my end provided charts that pinned down the frequency perfectly.)
That circuit had lead sheathed cable for part of its path. After one call to retentions, I had an AT&T convention at my house once or twice per week.
They were all in uniforms, driving fancy logo'd trucks. They all failed to make it work correctly.
Until one day, some dude with facial piercings who was dressed like me in jeans and a black tshirt showed up. I don't know what back office they pulled this guy out of, but he insisted that this was his problem now, that he was the most qualified person to correct it, and that he would be working on it until it was identified and fixed, and that he would begin as soon as he went back to get a bucket truck.
I don't know what all he got into. He worked until well after dark. And then he came back to the door and pronounced with great confidence that he had found an issue with some old lead sheathed cable and corrected it, and that this would absolutely resolve my problem.
And it did. 10/10 stability after that.
(Shoulda kept his contact info. He'd have been a good one to hire.)
So I guess it's not only about getting off the internet - there is a real shift in complexity in these more modern stacks too.
Containers are 10x better than monitoring and supporting some 30 years old switch in a central office that consumes more power than my cul de sac.
However, VoLTE predates k8s adoption in most telcos and the physical network appliance == NF model is still alive and well, so it’s not necessarily a fair comparison. You’re also right about the added complexity of SIP/RTP (let’s agree not to talk about MMS lol).
How does a person get started on working with it?
In this way, grid power could come and go rapidly and the switches wouldn't even notice. There there was no handoff, or switchover time. The chemical batteries just changed from being held at a steady SoC to being discharged, which is something they can do without complaint or interruption. KISS.
After that, at least for the AT&T-built central office down the road from where I grew up, the generators would engage and keep things going indefinitely (or until fuel ceased to flow).
- 2019: Verizon/BGP routing issue
- 2021: Verizon/FIOS routing issue
- 2021: Fastly CDN outage
- 2021: Comcast: San Francisco backbone outage
- 2021: Akamai: Edge DNS outage
- 2022: Rogers telecom routing issue
- 2023: Cloudflare: DNSSec expired certificates triggered an outage
- 2025: Cloudflare: core proxy outage
Yeah we've had a similar thing happen in Australia. Most VoIP services require you to either tick a box or verbally waive one's rights to said requirements in regards to reliability and fault rectification timelines.
However, there hasn't been too much of an issue with transition to VoIP here, apart from the unreliability of some services they're being run on, and keeping emergency contact details up to date. The latter resulting in fines for providers here and there.
Mostly, it's just pushed mobile/cell services to the forefront, along with reliability concerns during major outages. (There have been a couple major outages to cellular/mobile connectivity where access to emergency services have been lost)
Surveyed usage of landlines for calls at home is about 12% here, down from about 54% in 2017.[1]
[1] https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2026-02/report/communic...
... providers bricking huge numbers of perfectly-good phones, in some cases brand new devices, because ACMA decided they weren't worthy of making emergency calls.
Over the last 2 years we've had to call in to get repairs done many times, and I don't know if we ever did in the 20 years before that.
And in the last couple months, our phones regularly quit working completely and we have to call in and go through lots of troubleshooting steps before the tech comes out and fixes the line half a mile away for the 10th time, only for it to quit working in another week or three.
... like one Fax machine?
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?
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.
In Canada, Bell has actually discontinued battery backup in their latest modems, supposedly because they were having trouble with modems not rebooting correctly.
https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/battery-backup/p...
What a fuckin' joke.
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.
You see the same thing happen when theres a mass shooting and you get tons of people calling 911 and then you get a ton of people calling their loved ones to find out if theyre okay.
The cell towers also rely on an internet backbone so if you lose power long enough to lose internet then you lose cell towers even if they have all the power they need.
You could try putting all the communications infrastructure on a high priority circuit or something but unless your going to build out a hardened power grid parallel to the existing one, that would only cover you from load shedding not from natural disasters or even just power lines sagging on a hot day until they short circuit and blow the grid. So im not sure it would be worth the cost.
Have you? All of them I've encountered take a very standard 12V lead-acid battery - the same one that's inside consumer UPS units - and you can get replacements from a dozen brands on Amazon and other vendors.
I probably have to replace them every 2-3 years, though I imagine alkaline D-Cells would be far worse.
There's about 70 different sizes for these standard 12V lead-acid batteries though. And most of my consumer UPS units hide the battery behind a security screw and don't list the battery size in the docs. If the battery was removed and not replaced, it's harder than it should be to find a new one.
Tricky bit is getting a good charger if you're getting them for a device that doesn't charge its own batteries.
If you look at the voltage curves, Alkaline batteries start at higher voltage than NiMH but drop below NiMH voltage pretty quickly, so unless you have a device that stops working when your alkaline batteries drop below 50% charge or so at 1.2V, there's no reason to avoid NiMH.
And I thought NiMH was better at current draw than alkaline.
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.
So don’t worry about that particular issue on the POTS side. On wireless, it feels like anything goes (not really true, but by comparison it’s the Wild West)
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.
Chatting to the BT guy that last visited, they reckoned the street cab would only last for half a day or so without power.
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.att.com/scmsassets/support/other/att-phone-advan...
They cannot manage the QoS over the broadband link.
My personal experience is any power outage lasting more than a few hours is also going to take out your community's broadband.
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.
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
Now I wonder if maybe it's time to get licensed.
I agree though that getting licensed might be useful for knowing how to use it.
That's the whole point IMHO. You need practice to properly use a radio, especially during an emergency.
I don't know for sure about POTS, because the pricing was prohibitive, but my local telco certainly did not use batteries at the remote terminal to keep ADSL online... when utility power dropped, ADSL dropped instantly, even when the outages were under 10 seconds.
My local wireless telcos provide about 4-8 hours of wireless after utility power drops. Not great, but better than what I got from ADSL + voip.
The VRADs scattered around the city included a battery that worked for as long as it worked. But I never did discover how long those batteries would last, because AT&T brought portable generators out to supply power to their VRADs.
I kept my end alive with the portable generator that I was using intermittently for everything else along with the backup battery that the modem came with.
The VDSL circuit never dropped during those two weeks -- and yes, I read the logs afterward with some astonishment. :)
(Since the RF environment was extremely quiet, wifi had fantastic range. I opened up an SSID for anyone within earshot to use and some folks actually did use it.)
---
Fast forward a dozen or so years. When the power dips in my neighborhood, the cable network drops out with it. So, sure: I've got a small UPS for my little stack of network gear, but fat lot of good that does when there's nobody for it to talk to.
And I've got ways to use LTE/5G as a backup, but the performance of the cell network also nosedives at that same time. It's not clear to me if that's due to a service interruption or instead due to everyone's pocket supercomputer switching from wifi to cellular data, but whatever the cause: It turns pretty useless.
(I'm on FTTH fiber now but it's only been a week. We'll see how it does the next time there's a power issue.)
The impression I have is that the batteries are, in part, sized to give you a chance to fix the generator if it doesn't immediately start up.
CO buildings in the US still maintain that infrastructure even though the buildings themselves are full of broadband hardware and an actual CO is now just a block of RAM
If you're lucky. Not sure if US or UK is enforcing batteries on routers to provide emergency services, but AFAIK in most of Europe there's nothing like that.
The bright side was this helped me convince her to get rid of the POTS as the benefit she wanted was larger already gone anyway.
What does Single Order refer to? One purchase order at a time?
My (pensioner) mother lives in a very rural area and Andrews and Arnolds is "her" ISP (which I pay for). The main issue is that a) no mobile network works indoors; and b) uptime is crap -- there were two months of 70% uptime in the last year and during both of them PSTN worked brilliantly when DSL didn't.
The main thing I'm worried about is 999 calls. She doesn't have mobile reception and PSTN is far, far more robust. She does get a lot of power cuts but that's not as common as degradation to the 10 km line from the "cabinet" by livestock or trees...
A SOTAP line should work through a local power cut (reminder: check ours next time), it is a "transitional product" though for longer timescales it'll have to be something else (SPOT as a satellite service springs to mind, but as a cost).
I think this is the crux. You should definitely mail everyone affected.
Send a letter 2 years before. 1 year before. 1 month before. Do a scream test at termination date (switch off for a day and see who pipes up), keep operating for two weeks and that's it.
Some people will never switch as long as "it works", but that's not your problem. Some letters, a website that the young generation can easily share (a daughter visits and a son takes care of IT, not uncommon.)
So all of it.
oh it is el Reg, cheeky bastards
Fairly obviously, the SOTAP kit continues to provide power from the local exchange so even in the (relatively common) power cuts here the phones continue to work (we're not on any kind of priority register or anything like that, I assume it's just BT are dealing with peopole living out in the sticks).
N.B. we also have a 2nd line, on a business account (WFH) - that one is full digital, 70mbps VDSL and has cisco/yealink ATAs for phone service. So two lines, a home line that's SOTAP and a work line that's broadband/digital voice.
[1] https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/09/openreach-laun...
Long-wave and Radio Teleswitch just shut down in the spring. After medium wave shut downs in 2024. Different topic but lots of communication changes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch
The move is part of a wider government scheme to get the UK onto all-digital high-speed networks running on fiber-optic infrastructure, and the legacy phone service – with its dependency on copper cabling – was standing in the way.
Not surprising that the government is involved; using new technology for new installations is acceptable, but cutting off existing paying customers with service that may have been working just fine for many decades is hostile.
I'm not in the UK, but my house has had a working landline since I bought it many decades ago, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Nice to see the younger generation caring so much about the elderly.
> the government don't want to waste money
The government exists to waste money, and if they want to start saving some I can think of 1000 better places to start.
Hasn't really been much of an issue day-to-day. My mother for example still uses her landline phone on the same phone number she's had for decades via VOIP that the ISP operates. The vast majority of people use mobile phones as their primary voice service and it all seems to work just fine. But there has been a few notable outages (e.g: Telstra and their NTP mess, Optus and their emergency-call routing issues), and of course there's fringe issues with coverage gaps, but overall I'd say the mobile voice network is as reliable as the old POTS was (which was far from perfect).
I know there's copper for FTTN internet - but not phone calls?
The area I'm around still has plenty of copper that can't even run asdl. If people are lucky they have a mobile tower in sight with good signal or spend their own money to erect a small tower with external antenna / amplifier. One of the issues way back when NBN was first implemented, telcos were much more focused on just moving everyone to mobile services, while they improved their own mobile networks as much as they needed to offer a bare minimum - they had the ears of some in the government.
I hope at some point most people have NBN fibre arriving close enough if not fibre, a node with the copper in ground to be able to run faster speeds than asdl2+ ... I say that in an odd way only for the fact I knew of one region that had good asdl2+ speeds ... one of the later iterations of NBN (brought copper back into the equation along with the not fit for purpose butterfly connectors which soon corrode in use) ... a cheat to look good with roll out it was decided to convert those quite capable asdl2+ copper lines to NBN ... the outcome was the speed delivered was slower ... much slower - dial up speed while paying through the nose. I'm not sure if those poor folks ever got real NBN later on.
Dial up was killed off some years ago, so yes, just phone.
The other is the even weirder SOTAP for Analogue[1], where they put what is effectively a router at the exchange for you; so it delivers old-fashioned POTS without the capability to have any digital service on the line. Like a mini-DSLAM without data.
[0] https://www.openreach.com/content/dam/openreach/openreach-da... [1] https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/09/openreach-laun...
As an added bonus, it also works when you're not at home.
I think I can count on one hand the times cell service has been down for me in the last 20 years.
(update - googling seems they just turn off the phone service but keep the data on the same copper wires)
Around 2am to 4am about twice a month my phone line and internet are down for randomly timed maintenance.
This is the peak time for people to die in their sleep https://deathspersecond.com/blog/how-many-people-die-in-thei...
They really should track usage of calls going into and out of the old switch for the copper line. That will tell you who is still using the old copper lines.