General > General Technical Chat

The end (almost) of an era!!

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unknownparticle:

--- Quote from: IanB on November 30, 2022, 02:06:55 am ---

Anyone remember the "TrimPhone", a sleeker and more compact alternative to the big, clunky, traditional phone that was previously all you could get?



--- End quote ---

Yup, I have several, all of which still work!!  In fact one of them is my daily driver at the mo!!  It's quite funny to see the faces on people if they hear it 'ring', or rather chirp!!  Mine are the push button dial type, so quite 'modern' really!  Strange thing is, I hated them when they were introduced, but am very fond of them now!!  Also, we, as a family, had one of the first push button dial phones, ie, the otherwise standard looking phone but with a push button dial unit instead of a dial.  It was a big deal when introduced and had to be installed with a training session by the engineer when delivered!!  The electronics were quite interesting, including a rechargeable NiCad battery to power them!  The battery charged from the phone line and the circuitry was powered by the battery.  Phone still had a bell though, powered by the line!  Still have that very phone, I 'adopted' it when we moved!!

PlainName:

--- Quote ---had to be installed with a training session by the engineer when delivered!!
--- End quote ---

Quite a step down from that to being lucky to have a single A7 sheet of 2 point Chinglish nowadays.

steve30:
At the moment you can have a copper POTS line and a fibre FTTP line simultaneously, but you'd have to pay for both, which would work out expensive. The POTS is going to be discontinued from 2025, so while you will still (to an extent) be able to get ADSL/VDSL over copper after that, there will be no analogue telephone service on the copper wire.

My recommendation is to get VoIP. I pay £1.20/month for a number and a couple of pence per minute with Andrews & Arnold. This will work from any internet connection, but if you have fibre (FTTP), there should be no packet loss and negligible latency, which is ideal for VoIP. If you use a proper VoIP provider (like A&A), you can use whatever equipment you choose. This could be a dedicated VoIP phone, or it could be an analogue telephone adaptor. Personally, I have both; a Snom 720 is my main phone, and a GPO 746 is hooked up to a Grandstream ATA. Grandstream ATAs support pulse dialling and are capable of ringing the bells.

If you have "extension wiring" in your house and wish to use this with your telephones, you can simply disconnect your wiring from the old BT line, and hook it up to your ATA: https://support.aa.net.uk/VoIP_How_to:_Voice_reinjection

The other option is "BT Digital Voice" which most BT resellers offer as a POTS replacement. This is a walled garden VoIP service where the ISP will provide you with a Modem-Router-AP-ATA combi unit, and you plug your analogue phone into the back of the router. This however seems quite expensive compared to standard VoIP providers like A&A and Sipgate etc. I have never used this personally so can't comment on it.

I hope that might be helpful.

coppice:

--- Quote from: themadhippy on November 29, 2022, 08:41:34 pm ---
--- Quote ---If UK government had invested as heavily in communications as they have in useless and pointless green energy policy, the whole country could have had comms technology that would have actually been beneficial
--- End quote ---
Uk could have had fibre to every home back in the 80's,but instead bt  was sold off and the funds allocated  for fibre were fudged through creative accounting to  make the books look good.yet another one of thatchers legacys.

--- End quote ---
Er, no. At the end of the 80s I was at STC/Nortel. Colleagues were working on early passive optical networking ideas, but it really wasn't ready for market. By the mid 90s the details were in better shape, and some deployments could probably have got off the ground then. There was a fibre to the home demo system in the 80s in Milton Keynes, but at a high cost per house that would not scale. In those days it was considered vital to have power for the phone in an emergency. Things like company PBXs were generally required to have at least 8 hours battery backup. Maintaining such backup in every home would have been a serious problem, as batteries aged. A lot of the design of BRI ISDN in the 80s had been focussed on this issue, only relying on the integrity of the phone line to be able to power the customer premises equipment. Nobody had a real power solution for passive optical networks. Ubiquitous cell phones now side step this issue.

themadhippy:

--- Quote ---There was a fibre to the home demo system in the 80s in Milton Keynes, but at a high cost per house that would not scale
--- End quote ---
strange, the head of bt engineering is on record saying


--- Quote ---"In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop".

--- End quote ---


As an aside was that the houses of the future or some such nonsense in ,i think ,heelands

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