Why telephone landlines are a lifeline during storms in a digital era – Yorkshire Post Letters

From: William Loneskie, Oxton, Lauder, Berwickshire.

BEFORE 2025 all landline telephones will be disconnected – and for many it’s already happened – and customers moved to “digital voice”.

This means that instead of your phone using a secure line running underground in cables it will be replaced with a new phone connected to the internet via a router. The process is well under way.

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Before your landline is disconnected, BT will send you a new router and a phone with instructions on how to connect the phone to the internet. Our landline phones will then become junk.

What is the future for telephone landlines?What is the future for telephone landlines?
What is the future for telephone landlines?

In BT’s guide to digital voice they say: “You won’t be able to call 999 (or any other numbers) from this phone if there’s a power cut or you have a problem with your broadband connection. So make sure you’ve got another 
way to call for help in an emergency.”

During Storm Arwen the only phone we could use was the BT landline into the master socket using a simple cabled handset. The digital (portable) phones were down as were all the mobile networks – for two days. If we were on “digital voice”, we would have been unable to phone 999 or any other number at all.

Digital voice is making communications less safe and secure.

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