It has been widely reported that traditional telephone lines are being phased out but the details are still (in mid 2024) sketchy to say the least.
VERY basically on a traditional telephone system your conversation travels from one telephone to another down wires. What will happen in future is that it will be digitally coded and sent via the internet and then be decoded at the other end. This is called Voice Over Internet Protocol and isn’t itself new.
It would appear that if you wish to continue to use a conventional telephone, as opposed to a mobile, you will have to subscribe to a VOIP service. BT are offering one called Digital Voice for instance and Virgin are doing something similar. To use that you'll un-plug your ’phone from the socket where the wire enters your house and put it in a socket on your router/hub which will do the digital coding and decoding. If you’ve got extra sockets you’ll also have to move the wires going to those as well.
There’s also hysteria about telephones then not working if there’s a power cut. Whilst that is true, cordless ones, which are what most people now have, have always needed mains electricity to work.
Customers of other companies are more in the dark. I’m on PlusNet and they seem to be getting out of the telephony market altogether. They are no longer taking on new customers for their mobile service and are directing them to EE, which is another company in the BT group, and are simply saying a that after the switch landlines will not work. They don’t seem to be offering any sort of VOIP service. Of course in practise we are free to go to any VOIP provider we choose, such as Voipfone, and provide our own Analogue Telephone Adapter to do the coding/de-coding. Sky aren't saying anything.
How will this effect old telephones? I’m sure they’ll still work for incoming calls but dialling-out could well be a problem. Telephones with dials, and early ones with buttons, used something called Loop Disconnect dialling, more commonly referred to a Pulse Dialling. Modern ones use Dual Tone Multi-Frequency or Tone Dialling. I suspect that the new gear will only work with DTMF or, if it does work with pulse, it’ll be very picky and the pulses generated by a dial won’t be accurate enough. There are devices to convert pulses to tones however. For more on that see 'A Homemade LD-DTMF Converter,' which also gives information about commercially available ones.
VERY basically on a traditional telephone system your conversation travels from one telephone to another down wires. What will happen in future is that it will be digitally coded and sent via the internet and then be decoded at the other end. This is called Voice Over Internet Protocol and isn’t itself new.
It would appear that if you wish to continue to use a conventional telephone, as opposed to a mobile, you will have to subscribe to a VOIP service. BT are offering one called Digital Voice for instance and Virgin are doing something similar. To use that you'll un-plug your ’phone from the socket where the wire enters your house and put it in a socket on your router/hub which will do the digital coding and decoding. If you’ve got extra sockets you’ll also have to move the wires going to those as well.
There’s also hysteria about telephones then not working if there’s a power cut. Whilst that is true, cordless ones, which are what most people now have, have always needed mains electricity to work.
Customers of other companies are more in the dark. I’m on PlusNet and they seem to be getting out of the telephony market altogether. They are no longer taking on new customers for their mobile service and are directing them to EE, which is another company in the BT group, and are simply saying a that after the switch landlines will not work. They don’t seem to be offering any sort of VOIP service. Of course in practise we are free to go to any VOIP provider we choose, such as Voipfone, and provide our own Analogue Telephone Adapter to do the coding/de-coding. Sky aren't saying anything.
How will this effect old telephones? I’m sure they’ll still work for incoming calls but dialling-out could well be a problem. Telephones with dials, and early ones with buttons, used something called Loop Disconnect dialling, more commonly referred to a Pulse Dialling. Modern ones use Dual Tone Multi-Frequency or Tone Dialling. I suspect that the new gear will only work with DTMF or, if it does work with pulse, it’ll be very picky and the pulses generated by a dial won’t be accurate enough. There are devices to convert pulses to tones however. For more on that see 'A Homemade LD-DTMF Converter,' which also gives information about commercially available ones.