Why are BT migrating landlines to Digital Voice?

Am Waiting for my mums phone in the uk for sky update&phones as have 5 bt phones top video well explain

I AM SICK TO DEATH OF BT PHONING ME EVERY TWO MINUETS, LEAVE ME ALONE FOR GODS SAKE. YOU DO NOT NEED TO TELL ME A DELIVERY, i KNOW. i WAS THE ONE THAT MADE THE ORDER. i AM 84 AND I HAVE FELL OVER RUSHING PHONE. INCASE IT`S A EMERGENCY!!!!!!!!!

Absolute crap service on all fronts!
This is not an improvement, it's a backward step BT!!
Biggest negative is that during a power cut you've no landline!! I don't have any mobile signal at home so I'm well and truly fucked! Add to that the delay meaning natural flowing conversation becomes impossible then the breaks meaning you have to ask the person to 'repeat' all the time! Listen to BBC Radio 4 interviews if you want to know how bad telephone comms have become!

The voice tone from the new handsets is not as good as my analogue phone was. Also, cannot change the ringing tones or wallpaper. Not happy

So, in 2 years time (2025 I understand), when the analogue telephone system is retired and everyone needs to be on FTTP, what will happen to the people who don't want their driveway dug up to lay in a
fibre-optic cable?
Okay, they can use a mobile phone, but how will they get a broadband service with no fibre to their property?

Excellent video. Sharing.
There's also the issue of getting parts for the old exchanges.
Cassettes have made a comeback too. 😜

Wouldn't touch BT with a very long pole. Been with Zen for years and just got FTTP and Digital Voice last month. 900 Mbps internet and the phone is fine, just had to change a plug from one socket to another. An Uninterruptible Power Supply means we won't have a problem if the power fails either.

Bt allow sip devices such as grand steam to be allowed on fibre digital voice only connections than a hub 2 , thus allowing own equipment as main router whist still allowing a analog phone to connect

no more emergency calls [no emergency calls] from your home if no electrical power [this includes when your mobile is dead] is available that is terrible nobody will have a choice as every thing is going digital

and everyone will have to have fibre very expensive for customers but good for shareholders and remember in a government emergency all servers go down except BT

Why are traditional landlines dying in 2025?

Old burglar alarm and elderly person alert systems which are hooked up to an existing analogue phone line will presumably need replacing? But I guess it doesn't matter when the power is down..

What a brilliant "upgrade". Putting all your eggs into the internet basket. Your router fails? No phone calls. Internet servers fail? No phone calls. Power cut? No phone calls. Want to use your phone in other room where you used to have a workign extension socket? No way; you have to dick about with cordless phones, faffing about linking them and just hope you haven't got thick walls or that the spectrum isn't absolutely rammed full of similar devices already. Got a fall alarm of telecare device? Well that will stop working too! Apparently BT's advice was "buy a mobile". These of course also fail in an extende dpowercut as the repeater towers go offline. I'd had some experienc eof this: my wall socket was "upgraded" - all the extension sockets stopped working (and my router was plugged into one upstairs, right next to the PC, and I used a wired connection to it). After the "upgrade" the router had to stay downstairs and I had to use wirless. Liek everywhere else, the wireless spectrum is ram packed and I get lots of contention , plus my home's walls are quite thick and the signal gets attentuated a lot.

1. What took them so long.
2. How much will it cost?
3. I'll probably be dead before we get FTTP from BT.

I don’t feel it a trend seems more like a push to me, not forgetting the suppliers will have full control of who watches what and when

If you have a newish BT Hub then switching over is easy. Your answering machine should still work and BT will supply a free adaptor for an extension. Mine changed over last November but no one else in my building has even been contacted yet.
BT seems to be rolling out the service in a weird, piecemeal way which is very odd. Even so, everything is working OK.
There are people who don't have broadband or a smart phone so what they're supposed to do is a mystery.

my landline was already plugged into an analogue telephone adapter; - now I have a small gizmo that plugs into the mains and acts as a phone line, - my ata is now plugged into it ...what I really wanted was to be able to use the gizmo as an ata connected to my pbx but it is locked to propriety only....

The problem of being able to make emergency calls during power outages would be for the home router to include without charge backup battery for the router. An updated handset that would be able to use router-based power for the handset with enout backup capcity to provide several hours of service.

Battery backup for routers, or plugin ups, on a small scale. Keep the router running.

It's Openreach, now a separate company, that is doing this. The current exchanges are many years old and the equipment is no longer made. As failures occur repairs and replacements are more difficult or impossible. Openreach are forced to change the equipment to digital, forcing BT to change our connection.

Big mistake getting rid of PSTN they could have run fibre to the houses along the copper wires and leave the pstn alone. It was built with taxpayers money when BT was a nationalised company so should remain. They are reliable, they work when the National grid is down and you can have extensions and pick upo the call anywhere in the house. Now you have to know the telephone number of every member of the family.

I think the key point about digital voice is that it’s an enabler to remove the copper network and gets rid of all the local telephone exchanges. I certainly think that BT could have thought much more about the impact on vulnerable users or those with a requirement for calls in a power outage, but I believe they have better plans in place for that now. Personally I think digital voice is one step but the much more important one for the country is the FTTP rollout as that will allow the UK to turn off all the TV transmitters enable the next shift to fully streaming TV as well as giving all of us a 10x or 100x increase in broadband speeds. Personally I think it can’t come soon enough, but there’s no way digital voice will be done by the end of next year

My house has several analogue extention sockets built in. Will they become redundent?
What happens if you require those extentions for multiple phones?
Peter

There are hub battery backup units to cover power outages

Get a UPS to take you through power outages.

BT have offered voicemail on analogue landlines for many years.
The real USP of landlines has always been their remarkably reliable uptime, even through powercuts, which will now be susceptible to any broadband fluctuations.
BT have been very anti-competition in choosing a proprietary VoIP protocol, that isn't compatible with existing systems, again forcing customers to use supplied routers.

We have two (separate) telephone lines (separate telphone numbers) in our house: one for work and the other for personal. The work number is already linked to our broadband, so I assume when the switchover happens we will simply plug the work phone linked to that broadband line into the existing BT Smarthub router.

But what about our personal phone number? Will BT have to provide us with an entirely separate/new router for the our personal telephone number?

Telephone operators need to sell backup power backs to keep voice calls operating during power cuts.

So, the answer to the question 'Why?' is that the change is to benefit the service provider rather than the user. And I'll bet our national security services will continue to use the well tried and trusted systems which are less easily hacked into than IP services.

This reminds me of the push towards smart meters. Are we sure they will not use it to monitor our calls and web usage? Power cuts are more likely than ever now and we will be cut off completely without a mobile phone which we couldn't charge. I don't trust this and they have started bombarding us with reminders to get it booked in.

F**k BTs new Digital phone