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Comment by lambdaone | Hacker News Reader

Soon to be repeated in the UK, by the end of January 2027. We've now passed the tipping point where doing telephony end-to-end entirely over IP is cheaper that keeping the baseband analog PSTN going. The main network backbone, of course, has been all-VoIP for years.

It's taken British telcos years to plan for this, and it's been put off a couple of times to deal with practical problems such as situations where you absolutely can't put fiber-to-the-premises in in any reasonable timescale.

This time they really seem to be determined to make it happen, even if it involves bizarro products like SOGEA, and if I recall correctly a sort of exchange-hosted baseband-only single-line DSLAM for the most intractable cases such as elderly people with no access to mains power - but even then it will implement the standard Digital Voice protocols, not the legacy DSLAM stuff.

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Over the past couple of years, my parents have had several multi-day outages with their phone line. Each time, we contacted Sky, who contacted Openreach and they eventually fixed things, but then it would stop working again months later.

I guess they're just not maintaining that infrastructure like they used to.

Finally my parents succumbed and now their phone is plugged into their router.

Right now, Openreach are maintaining two entirely different local loop networks, one baseband and other IP. My experience of their PON network is that it's rock solid, and that's clearly where all the effort is going - it's much easier to keep connectivity if you can link your PON headend to the exchange via multiple fibre paths so when street works sever one cable the other keeps working, unlike with legacy copper-to-the-exchange.

They very much want to cut that back to one; big cost savings. And there are eventually going to be (hundreds of?) millions to be made from tearing the copper out from underneath the pavements and selling it, unless copper thieves get there first.

What are the plans for people who can't get fibre to the property?

There are multiple options, including internet from mobile phone providers and satellite internet. The affordability and speeds are good enough that it's not a major problem.

That said, there are devices that depend on the old phone network that need to be replaced, such as alarm systems for vulnerable people, but the risk of vulnerable people that can't switch to VoIP services is fairly low, especially as this switchover has been known about for a long time.

IP-only != fibre. Try reading my comment above in its entirety. You can also read this for further enlightenment about SOGEA:

https://www.btwholesale.com/products-and-services/data/sogea...

I wish I had a link for the other thing, but it was deep inside some Openreach site that Google don't seem to have access to.

Cell phone.

and for old people who cannot use mobile phones?

Then they can't use a wall phone either.

plain not true, my grandmother can use a wall phone but not a mobile phone

Is she using a wheel dial? Otherwise, the user interface is almost the same for wall phones and cell phones for seniors. Except that you have to press the dial button for it to dial.

>We've now passed the tipping point where doing telephony end-to-end entirely over IP is cheaper that keeping the baseband analog PSTN going. The main network backbone, of course, has been all-VoIP for years.

Is it really or is one just more profitable because you can charge more for IP than analog? I came here to ask this because it genuinely feels like a way to remove cheaper alternatives.

Mandating that the analogue system be kept limping along in parallel would not be a cheaper alternative.

I'd rather have USPS or some quasi-government org take over some of these 'obsolete' systems than for them to just disappear altogether. There needs to be a rock bottom, bare bones option to keep prices down. We need to have more competition, not less--there are only a handful of true options for cellular or local internet. This seems to just be a way to cut off legacy infrastructure that was working fine to force people to buy into more modern (i.e. expensive) options.

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