PSTN switch off - can we have a PN update?

[#1]

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@knowdice wrote:

I hope they are not thinking about going to some proprietary system 🤔

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You mean like BT's digital voice service?  Which I understand to be not the same as other VoIP / SIP services.

[#2]

Personally would be quite happy if Plusnet converted my current PSTN number in to a SIP account.

There is plenty of SIP hardware out there that will do the job and I have been using SIP from Gradwell on my Plusnet FTTC since 2006 and know that it works well.

[#3]

@Baldrick1 The most worrying part of this guidance is that phone providers only have to provide access to emergency services for a minimum of an hour in the event of a power cut. So if you do have a heart attack during a power cut try and make sure you have it in the first 59 minutes. Thanks Ofcom.

[#4]

@Ortero 

Or use a mobile phone? Mobile phone battery flat? Sit in the car and plug the phone charger in there.

I agree that it's not good if you have no mobile connection but that is improving and I have it in my head that mobile phones can be used to make emergency calls using any mobile network, regardless of which network to which your SIM is locked.

[#5]

The emergency call is defined as 999 or 112 , however an emergency call to a neighbor/friend/family would fall outside of this.

So if your power goes down - you could use a mobile , and even among the older population mobile phone ownership is increasing, so if the power that powers your router and integrated/separate ATA as well as the ONT goes down then the mobile ( if charged) will still power up.

 However i use the word you could use a mobile, as the electricity that powers your router, ATA, ONT etc is the same stuff that also powers the phone mast and associated equipment .

 In my current location all the mobile phone networks vanish  between 10 minutes and just under 30 minutes into a power cut , as the battery back up  in the masts run out.

[#6]

My local mobile mast lasts about 45 minutes in a power cut - a couple of years ago we were 5 hours in to one power when, with the help of a strong wind, a neighbour's bonfire spread to the hedgerow and was heading toward our house. We had no signal to call the fire brigade, so had the choice of driving to where we could make a call and leave the fire to spread, or tackle it ourselves. We were lucky enough to get it under control with a chain of people passing buckets of water.

Resilience needs to be considered.

[#7]

The issue is that resiliance costs money, and as a private com[any why spend money on something that has no commercial value?

 Back in te days of the cold war the phone system was used amongst other thigns to drive things such as carrier control points  that is local warning systems ( ie the so called 4 minute warning attack sirens)

 The phone network, under the then GPO was a key part of the UK's defence system , and as a by product of this it was and still is in parts resiliant , even though the back up generators are aging, and the vast phone exchanges no longer need to be as big, some of this infrastructure sits on land that could be portioned off for housing/development . As for key national defence infrastructure  other methods are now available.

 See here for the phone network dring the cold war : http://www.ringbell.co.uk/ukwmo/Page241.htm

The only way we will see resiliancce baked into the system - that is available to the public, will be through legislation and regulation and then that will only begrudgingly happen after something happens .

 Its just a shame that we are at a point where something could be done as FTTP is being rolled out, and PTSN is about to start being phased out that would provide back up/resliiance but yet nowt  is being done and wont be until its too late/to expensive - as that is the British way

[#8]

Yes, the problem is that the regulators are not insisting on resilience in the systems that are being built now. I used to work for a major telecoms manufacturer (not used in the UK, but very big around the world) and once an exchange was commissioned they had to guarantee (with $$$penalties) 99.999% uptime - that's less than 5 hours total downtime in the 50 year expected lifetime of the equipment. Each exchange was totally digital with up to 10,000 8086 processors,and it had to be possible to update the software without dropping a call. That was resilience.

I recently gained a Gigaclear FTTP connection - it is achieving around 75% availability. I have been told that they don't even monitor the performance as they rely on customers complaining. It is only when more than one customer in an area complains that they even look at the problem (and being a new network there aren't yet enough customers in my area to trigger a fault investigation).

[#9]

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@corringham wrote:

I recently gained a Gigaclear FTTP connection - it is achieving around 75% availability.

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That's pretty poor IMO.

For comparison I've had an Openreach FTTP connection via the PN FTTP trial for slightly over 6.5 years, and during that period downtime amounts to less than 10 hours, so by my reckoning that's in excess of 99.98% up time.

[#10]

You "may" be talking about two different topologies !!!

RobPN if you have had FTTP for 6.5 years then there is a good chance that your fibre goes directly from your home to the exchange (FTTH), whereas with Gigaclear FTTP it could well be GPON? and go through a cabinet aggregator and who knows what power backup that would have?

Might be interesting to know though...

[#11]

Anyone who lived through the 1974 Workers' Strike in Northern Ireland will remember that the sole means of communication when all power stations were shut down was the telephone network, and the radio for which everyone kept spare batteries. With widespread bombing and shooting incidents people needed reliable information.

We bought the fancy new Roberts when digital radio came out, and found it devoured batteries in about 30 hours. We keep a couple of old FM battery radios just in case -- for in the event of civil emergencies such as increasing effects of climate change and power failure there is no other way to contact the population. Yet some idiot wants to flog off the FM frequencies ...

Today's mobiles seem to need charging every 24 hours or less, and good luck with all these electric cars. Our ancient petrol pumps worked fine with a manual handle inserted in the front -- good luck with your electronic displays and tills. The list is endless and needs trying to appreciate the experience!

[#12]

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@knowdice wrote:

You "may" be talking about two different topologies !!!

RobPN if you have had FTTP for 6.5 years then there is a good chance that your fibre goes directly from your home to the exchange (FTTH), whereas with Gigaclear FTTP it could well be GPON? and go through a cabinet aggregator and who knows what power backup that would have?

Might be interesting to know though...

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@knowdice 

Very likely.

IDK about Gigaclear, but AIUI OR FTTP uses GPON, which doesn't involve an exclusive fibre from my home to the head-end as my fibre will be connected via a splitter (up to 32 connections from one fibre) and an aggregation node further upstream.  Completely passive apart from the end points. 

[#13]

My Gigaclear outages haven't actually been due to power issues, it has been  fibre damage and misconfiguration. The cabinets do have ~3hrs worth of battery backup (I spent some effort finding out before ordering).

They don't use GPON - every connection has its own fibre back to a distribution cabinet, there's no passive splitting (so they provide symmetric upload and download speeds). However, there are a lot of connections - the NTE in the premises connects to a POT at the property boundary, then a drop box, then the distribution cabinet, then back to their London data centre to connect to the internet. There are no redundant connections anywhere, so a feeder cable break can (and does) take out a county. They can detect a problem if the NTE loses connection (i.e. a fibre break), but apparently they can't check latency, or speed, or packet loss! I do know their Juniper equipment can, so it is policy rather than a technical limitation.

[#14]

"In other words, don’t worry about it."

Unless, like me and my seriously unwell and bed-bound wife, you have Lifeline pendants wirelessly connected to your landline.  OK, you say, just plug the phone line into the Hub and use VOIP.

Then there's a power cut and the hub goes down.  You are cut off.  2 days later, still no landline.  Cell phone batteries are flat. And the local cell mast is dead as well due to a really serious power cut.

PlusNet (i.e. BT / OpenReach) needs to set up / maintain a list of the 700,000 folk who have Lifeline pendants, and either leave the old copper PSTN lines in place with their built-in 50 volt battery supply, or else find another solution.

I'm off to get a large 230 volt battery/inverter backup unit (bigger than the mostly 1-hour ones on line) or better still, a propane-powered generator (quieter than petrol and giving longer gaps between refills).

P.S. folks who have PVA generator panels on their roofs and think they are safe need to know that these switch off automatically during a power cut to prevent hazard to the engineers trying to fix the power outage.  Ho hum.

[#15]

Modern, ie newer DAB radios last significantly longer than the first/second generation ones on battery.

My local phone masts dont just go down with a long powercut, they fail after about 10 - 15 minutes into a short one.

While you can use UPS devices, generators and so on to power a router and an ONT amongst other things, how are the other network devices further downstream powered? if openreach have closed the exchanges that housed the back up battery's and generators or decommissioned the expensive to maintain generator sets then what?

The copper network was designed during the cold war to be robust - or as robust as possible with various protections in place - it has to be as it formed a key part of the UKs civil ( and non civil) defence network , from activating air raid sirens ( the four minute warning) to being used to relay information about nuclear attacks and much more.

 But all of that is expensive , civil defence has mostly, if not all gone , the military have other communication methods and there are cheaper alternatives out there.

 So if someone cant call for help in a power cut , or a few houses burn down, and a few people die as a result then its not an issue as their lives are not worth the expense of installing a replacement system / systems that are just as robust