Landline phones will switch off across Britland in 100 days, no extensions

The biggest problems is power. The phone company power the POTS line — you can even make an emergency call from an abandoned building with no electrical service (and no phone subscription) if you find a jack and plug in. Under those huge central office buildings are huge banks of -48 V batteries which are required to provide a week of power (or was it two in the US? I can’t remember).

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.

An interesting component of the switching off of POTS is that the quality of service requirements are different. POTS is regulated to require the phone company to maintain a certain legal quality of service with negative consequences for failing to do so.

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.

> Anyone with concerns should contact their provider, but the responsibility cannot rest with customers alone.

Best of luck contacting your provider

> … public awareness seems low that analog phone services will soon be disconnected.

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?

[Tip] If you decide to cut the cord but want to keep your number you can port it to Andrews & Arnold (a small ISP, based in Bracknell) as a £1.80 per month VOIP subscription.

Finland a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786868

California's also been fighting this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/att-loses-key-ru...

Where is Britland?

It's still using the same cables if you're not using fttp. Just that the phone is connected through the router first.

most landlines in continental Europe are already VoIP

Internet services are the new walled city? -- be cast out at your own peril; suits the State just fine

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