Switching from FTTC to a VOIP service

[#1]

@Anonymous 

Sounds a familiar story.  I'd had the same mobile number since 1992, originally with Vodafone (the analogue mobile era!).  I switched to EE years ago, then when we built this house found there was no EE signal (even standing on top of the scaffolding).  I switched to O2, as they still use the 800MHz band, and that's the only band that sort of works in rural areas (the 1800MHz and 2100MHz bands are hopeless in hilly terrain).  O2 is OK when 100m or so up the hill behind our house, but as we don't use them much we just have cheap PAYG SIMs, so no WiFi calling.  Not sure that's a safe workaround for power cuts anyway, as the FTTC cabinet shuts down about 20 minutes after the power goes off, so even WiFi calling wouldn't give a reliable 999 service.

What has surprised me is just how good a 4G signal we are getting on the gateway box.  My best guess is that the pretty large outdoor antennas are the reason for this, plus the fact that I've got them on top of a 10ft pole bolted to the side of the house (means they are about 15ft above the upstairs window height).   Big investment in order to just maintain a potentially life-saving phone service though.  I spent thousands on getting Openreach to run cables in here a few years ago, little did I know they would be next to sod all use a few years later. 

[#2]

@bmc 

You're right, the saving isn't massive.  At the moment we're paying an average of around £42/month for Unlimited Fibre, with about £6 or so of that being day time call charges.  I reckon we'd save a bit on call charges by switching to A&A, but the main saving would be getting rid of the extra £8.71/month we pay for the Plusnet landline and call packages.

The price of an internet-only package is on my Plusnet account as an "upgrade" option, £26.99/month for what they call Fibre (seems to be FTTC without a phone line, which I strongly suspect is really SoGEA).

I'll report back once I've summoned up the energy to call Plusnet and try and get a meaningful answer.  Main thing I want to know is whether I can switch to the Fibre package and retain our number so it can be ported to A&A.  Shouldn't be any skin off Plusnet's nose as they've been clear that they don't want to be in the landline/VOIP phone business in future.

[#3]

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@JSHarris wrote:

... wouldn't give a reliable 999 service.

Not that the police bother turning up here - even after a drive-by shooting !  (windows of multiple cars - not people)

[#4]

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@JSHarris wrote:

@bmc 

You're right, the saving isn't massive.  At the moment we're paying an average of around £42/month for Unlimited Fibre, with about £6 or so of that being day time call charges.  I reckon we'd save a bit on call charges by switching to A&A, but the main saving would be getting rid of the extra £8.71/month we pay for the Plusnet landline and call packages.

The price of an internet-only package is on my Plusnet account as an "upgrade" option, £26.99/month for what they call Fibre (seems to be FTTC without a phone line, which I strongly suspect is really SoGEA).

I'll report back once I've summoned up the energy to call Plusnet and try and get a meaningful answer.  Main thing I want to know is whether I can switch to the Fibre package and retain our number so it can be ported to A&A.  Shouldn't be any skin off Plusnet's nose as they've been clear that they don't want to be in the landline/VOIP phone business in future.

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@JSHarris 

In case it's of interest, the OP in this thread managed to haggle his price for SoGEA VDSL down to £22.99 per month.

Edit:  typo

[#5]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@JSHarris wrote:

... wouldn't give a reliable 999 service.

Not that the police bother turning up here - even after a drive-by shooting !  (windows of multiple cars - not people)

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Not too worried about the police, at our age we're more concerned about getting an ambulance!

The police response locally is pretty slow.  Only time I've ever reported something, about a year ago, was when we had a strange character partially demolishing a new stone wall each evening.  Drove the stonemason doing to work crazy.  He'd turn up in the morning to find the top course of stones he'd laid the day before knocked into the ditch. 

I set CCTV up and caught the person red-handed.  A neighbour identified them, and I called the police.  Two weeks later (after the wall had been completed) a community support officer turned up and asked for a copy of the video.  AFAIK nothing further was done.

[#6]

@JSHarris 

Assuming you get some sort of call package via your VOIP provider it appears the saving would be around £9 - £10pm. Speaking to PN would give the actual prices and therefore savings.

You could speak to A&A and ask if they can confirm the number is suitable to be ported - some aren't for various reasons.

I reckon you have three choices.

1) Jump to SOGEA imediately for the saving.

2) Wait for the next round of power cuts and see how your 4g set up copes.

3) Wait until you're forced to jump by OpenReach - by which time they might be handing out back up power units to vunerable people. Another hour of so of power might be useful.

Brian

[#7]

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@bmc wrote:

@JSHarris 

Assuming you get some sort of call package via your VOIP provider it appears the saving would be around £9 - £10pm. Speaking to PN would give the actual prices and therefore savings.

You could speak to A&A and ask if they can confirm the number is suitable to be ported - some aren't for various reasons.

I reckon you have three choices.

1) Jump to SOGEA imediately for the saving.

2) Wait for the next round of power cuts and see how your 4g set up copes.

3) Wait until you're forced to jump by OpenReach - by which time they might be handing out back up power units to vunerable people. Another hour of so of power might be useful.

Brian

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Good summary.  The back up power isn't an issue, we have a large (22kWh) battery bank to keep the essential services going, plus a generator and solar panels to top the batteries up.  We had to do this as we have no mains services here apart from electricity and the phone line.  We're reliant on a borehole (and pump) for water and an electrically powered sewage treatment unit, so if the power goes for any length of time we have significant problems.  We can run for around 3 days without using the generator and I keep enough fuel for at least five days of generator charging.

I definitely want to see how the 4G holds up in bad weather.  We lose our satellite connection in heavy rain (can't get terrestrial TV here since the digital switchover) so I suspect that the 4G signal may similarly suffer in bad weather.  I believe we only need around 100Kb/s to make a VOIP call though, so we should be able to tolerate a pretty big drop in signal.  Time will tell.

I don't see SoGEA as a solution, as we already know that the local cabinet only has around 20 minutes of back up power.  Every time there's a power cut here the broadband goes down after about 20 minutes, and it's not related to anything our end, as that's all on a UPS, that maintains power whilst the battery system switches over.  Whether there's a problem with our cabinet, or whether this is normal behaviour for all cabinets I don't know.  If it is normal behaviour then I can see there being major issues when the PSTN does get decommissioned.

[#8]

@JSHarris 

Have you looked at Satelite broadband? Some what expensive but might keep you connected.

You might get lucky before the PSTN switchoff. FTTP might turn up which eliminates the cabinet power problem. Mobile phone coverage might be improved via one of the Government schemes.

If not, complain to all and sundry about being left without emergency contacts.

Brian

[#9]

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@bmc wrote:

@JSHarris 

Have you looked at Satelite broadband? Some what expensive but might keep you connected.

You might get lucky before the PSTN switchoff. FTTP might turn up which eliminates the cabinet power problem. Mobile phone coverage might be improved via one of the Government schemes.

If not, complain to all and sundry about being left without emergency contacts.

Brian

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I was very attracted to the idea of getting Starlink, until I bought a Tesla and experienced first hand the peculiar world of Musk.  Nothing would induce me to but anything from any company associated with him after my Tesla experience!

I've been told that FTTP is at least a decade away, and may well never make it here.  The length of the fibre run needed makes it very costly and there just aren't enough of us along this lane to make it worthwhile for Openreach.  We did get a community group together to try and fund a microcell, to give us a mobile signal, but even with the grant funding that was available, and the donation of a bit of land by a local farmer, the cost was prohibitive (as in tens of thousands of pounds each). 

For now I think I can get a working emergency link using the 4G gateway and the big antennas on a  mast.  Not really broadband speeds, but hopefully good enough for a VOIP connection I think.  Remains to be seen if it will work in bad weather or not, fingers crossed that it will.  It's an expensive solution if I had to buy the kit new, though.

I got lucky and found a farmer that was upgrading his system (used for monitoring his cattle collars) who flogged me a decent quality 5 year old commercial system for £60.  To buy this system new would cost around £400.  Seems to work OK with a £5/month SIM card, so overall not a bad solution.  It has the option to run two SIMs plus an Ethernet WAN connection, so I think I can set it up to use wired broadband, falling back first to number 1 SIM, then to number 2 SIM (on a different network) as a final fail safe.  I think this is perhaps overkill, but it is reassuring to have this degree of built in backup capability.

[#10]

I've had VOIP running through A&A, using a new number, for a few days now.  Seems to work fine.  Works the same whether I use the 4G gateway as the internet connection or if I use the Plusnet connection.  Easy to set up, only slightly awkward bit was having to type in manually the Dial Plan (would have been a LOT easier if A&A had allowed a cut and paste option). 

The Cisco SPA112 is an easy to configure unit, that accepts two separate phone circuits (so two different numbers).  Seems to be fine running four phones, with a REN of 3.

Next step is to test this for a couple of weeks or so, with the new (soon to be spare) number, then look at porting our landline number over from Plusnet, and getting rid of the line rental, ahead of it going when the PSTN gets closed down.

I tested the new battery backup unit today (this only really needs to provide uninterruptible power whilst the house back up battery system switches over (when there's a power cut).  The automatic backup power switch takes about a tenth of a second to switch, enough to make some stuff crash and reboot.  The DC UPS get's around that, by powering the modem, router, switch, 4G gateway and ATA without any dips.  It's only got enough power to run the kit for about an hour, but that's way more than is needed, as it should only need to keep things going for a fraction of a second when the grid power goes.

I'll report back on how I get on with porting our number across from Plusnet to A&A, and how well the 4G gateway holds up, especially in heavy rain.  So far I'm impressed, if it was maybe twice as fast then I think we could get rid of the landline FTTC service altogether.  I might be able to improve the 4G system, too, as I'm using an old gateway and second hand antenna system, both of which are probably not as good as some modern kit (this was only ever a proof-of-concept test, really).

[#11]

Good luck.

The most remote place I've stayed in a building is here

https://streetmap.co.uk/map?x=388581&y=614472&z=115&sv=388581,614472&st=4&ar=Y,y&mapp=map&searchp=id...

We sat in the bedroom and wondered why there were torches. We found out 10pm when the gennies went off.

They only had a phone line. No other services. (N.B. B&B is no longer available at the place, so I'm not advertising per se).

[#12]

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@greygit1 wrote:

Good luck.

The most remote place I've stayed in a building is here

https://streetmap.co.uk/map?x=388581&y=614472&z=115&sv=388581,614472&st=4&ar=Y,y&mapp=map&searchp=id...

We sat in the bedroom and wondered why there were torches. We found out 10pm when the gennies went off.

They only had a phone line. No other services. (N.B. B&B is no longer available at the place, so I'm not advertising per se).

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Believe it or not we are only about 12 miles from a city with a population of around 45,000!  Bizarre, but we, and lots of the communities around here, have far worse utilities and connectivity than many places that people would assume might be cut off from the civilised world.  We lived on the West coast of Scotland for a few years, in a tiny community, 60 miles from the nearest supermarket.

Even so, we had superb mobile connectivity back in the 1990's.  I think that was down to the Scottish Government subsidising masts, as we could drive the 100 miles to Glasgow and be sure of having a signal the whole way.  Like a lot of villages around here we can't get a usable signal on a phone until we get close to a main road - the phone companies can't be arsed to install masts just to serve small villages, as their income comes from people in cars on main roads I think.

This is our place, goes some way to showing why we don't get a signal, and why the power cables come down whenever the wind blows (the cables run through the trees - literally):

[#13]

Believe it or not we're closer to a larger city than you. And our phone (land) line and internet recently went awol for a little over seven days.

I get mobile reception outdoors or in the corner of one room in the house. Coverage is so poor that sending text messages fails outside these areas. In such a situation, making calls out is workable; receiving incoming calls means standing (and not moving) from the places where there is reception. The real mobile network coverage doesn't match the providers' "data". IMO.

PN shipped me a mi-wi device (4G). But it arrived after the overhead cable was restored. I'm itching to unpack it and try it (just to see whether it would work), but...

[#14]

We were forced to change banks a few years ago (before WiFi calling on mobiles) as our old bank changed to only using an SMS transmitted code for online banking 2FA.  We got around the fact this didn't work at home for a while , with my wife driving up the road until she got a signal and parking up.  I'd then log in to online banking, she would get the SMS code on the phone and scribble it down.  She would then call me on the landline so I could type it in before it expired, then she'd drive home.

The system was completely crazy, but the bank were uninterested in even discussing it, they seemed to be of the view that everyone always had a mobile signal.  We moved all our accounts to a bank that uses a card reader for 2FA, which works fine, in fact it's far and away the best solution as it works anywhere.  Bizarre thing was that after we closed all our accounts our old bank called to ask why we'd left.  I told them (rather bluntly) and the customer feedback person I was talking to was shocked that no one in the bank had found a solution to this problem.

I've now got some more experience with the VOIP phone experiment.  No issues with call quality or reliability.  The only consistent issue is that the phone is much more prone to misdialling. Unless you leave a short pause between each button press there is a high chance that the call won't work.  Catches me out for numbers I call regularly, where I know the number off by heart.  This never happens with the same phone plugged into the landline socket, so is unique to the VOIP connection.  Not a major concern, now I know about it it's easy to just slow down a bit when putting the number in.

[#15]

he only consistent issue is that the phone is much more prone to misdialling. Unless you leave a short pause between each button press there is a high chance that the call won't work.

@JSHarris it might be worth experimenting with changing the DTMF Tx Mode setting from Strict to Normal and see if that makes any difference