‘Snowdon Collection’ Trimphone – still with pulse dialling!

You’ve probably heard that the old copper phone lines will soon be switched off for good, after over a century of service. Since December 2023, you haven’t been able to buy a new land-line service from any company, the so-called “Stop Sell” date.

The exact switch-off dates have been moving around between the end of next year and January 2027, with variability in what Openreach (the wholesale supplier), and BT, Plusnet, Virgin Media etc (the retailers) say, which confuses the situation, but early 2027 appears the latest possible date. Beware that if you upgrade your broadband to “fibre” now,  or terminate your phone service rather than switching to another provider, you’re on the slippery slope to no conventional land-line, you cannot get it back once lost – possibly including your number – at any price.

Here we look at what the options and opportunities are, and note how surprisingly environmentally unfriendly and limited the default BT offer turns out to be, when compared with other options, and especially when compared with existing and in terms of environmental impact, the old tech. Google has similarly discovered that its new AI tech caused a 40% rise in power consumption last year, with AI reckoned to be 100 to 1000 times as energy intensive as traditional server activities, but here the percentage increase can dwarf even that, recalling that the IT industry is currently as responsible for as many global CO₂ emissions as air travel.

The change is happening globally – the US date was 2022, Canada 2023, and European countries have set various dates from 2021 to 2030.  The Luddites amongst us will be forced to act shortly, in one way or another, and if “full fibre” needs to be installed, the front of your building will very likely need a new hole drilled in it, hence our interest.

Here’s what Ofcom say. What they don’t appear to say is that there are independent services, a range of magic boxes, and even virtual solutions to convert your land-line number to the new tech, so that if it’s of value, you can keep it, without physical upheaval, and even use it on a mobile, independently of your existing supplier or broadband contract – read on.

The lack of a land-line won’t worry many, with unlimited calls now the norm for mobile contracts, and the most frequent users of land-lines now possibly nuisance callers, but it may be of concern if :

• You only have a land-line and no broadband internet connection.
• You have a burglar alarm with a monitoring service (auto dialler etc).
• You have a telecare service (falls detector etc).
• You run a business with a number that people know, which is also doubtless widely published.
• You want a full-featured desk phone, or the reliability and convenience of multiple phones around the home, rather than using your mobile.

BT Digital Voice Adapter
see this helpful article 

The wrinkles caused by the above less popular uses, together with people in rural areas being cut off after storms, appear part of the reason for the delays in final switch-off.

The switch-off is similar to analogue TV switch-off in 2012, and like that, there are magic boxes that can bridge the gap in many cases, but not all. The default BT offer is called a “Digital Voice Adapter” or DVA (as a TLA), into which you can plug a wired phone, which by the way, sadly can’t be a fully retro one with a dial or “pulse dialling”, which is not supported by the DVA, and it seems much else. 

Some routers include “Analogue Telephone Adapters” (ATA’s) or DECT base stations supporting existing domestic cordless phones, made by companies such as AVM (Fritzbox), Draytek, Technicolor, Zyxel, Grandstream and others, which make the conversion into the digital Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) world – rather more compact and energy efficient than the separate DVA. 

If Virgin Media is available to you (not in your correspondent’s road), they provide an ATA built into their Hub3, 4 and 5 modems, so you can connect a conventional phone directly to it. The BT Smarthub similarly contains an ATA (the green socket) but, as is the case with the optional DVA, it’s apparently tied technically to “BT digital voice”, forcing you down the BT route, currently not allowing the expected flexibility of well-established and standard VOIP, such as remote use on a smartphone.

The wrinkle is that you’ll need an internet connection for any of these solutions to work, but that should be provided by the phone supplier for those that don’t have an internet connection already at no charge, and you can keep your existing number when making that specific change.

The bigger wrinkle is that all these boxes have to be plugged in, which means unlike now, you’re paying a not insignificant bill to power the phone(s). For a DVA, this is stated as 13.8W, equal to 120kWh per year or, at 25p a unit, £30, which is really far too wasteful when the EU regulated standby power consumption for consumer items like TV’s etc was set over a decade ago at no more than 0.5W in standby / off mode, or 1W if displaying information. By way of comparison, recall those adverts telling you to switch things like TV’s off, rather than leaving them in standby, to save that relatively insignificant amount of power. The problem is that, in reality, this is computer networking kit – by its nature relatively thirsty.

Of course we are no longer in the EU, but the UK has adopted such requirements and in any case manufacturers are designing to them due to the relative market sizes. Specific rules exist for “network-connected” devices since January 2019 reflecting its thirsty nature: devices in networked standby must not consume more than 2 to 8 Watts depending on the product. There are new tighter EU regulations from 2025 which the UK can now potentially dodge.

We need to do the sums to work out just how much energy all this is using, the silver lining being that BT is no longer running their end in the telephone exchange, though spread across thousands of lines, their mass implementations would have been rather more efficient, per line. The current drawn by that old landline phone when not in use (“On Hook”, i.e. most of the time) is less than 0.001W.  BT 1 : Planet 0.

Openreach ONT (Nokia). Virgin Media uses something similar

BT Smart Hub 2

Referring to our Fibre broadband article of three years ago for some background, let’s examine what you need.

Anyone requiring a new broadband service will be have to have “Full Fibre” if it’s laid in the road, which entails drilling holes in the front of your home, with a new “Optical Network Terminal” or “ONT” box (shown adjacent), and possibly your front garden dug up if no suitable duct exists. The ONT can be thought of as the new kind of “master socket”, but as an electronic box, needs powering as shown, consuming a not insignificant 2.6 – 10W depending on model. You’ll also need a router – perhaps a BT Hub – consuming around 10W, even if you only need a phone line; this needs to be plugged into the ONT using a network cable as shown.  So if we had a single DVA, say for a bedroom phone, we’d be up to around 25W for the system, or 100,000 times more than just the power for an old landline, that was in any case provided by the exchange, ignoring the unknown proportion of power you’re responsible for in the exchange itself – just to make the point. A DVA is clearly best avoided if not absolutely needed.

The option of  FTTC “fibre to the green cabinet in the street” (which is much of the so-called “fibre” currently), still using the last hundred or two metres of copper, so avoiding the need for an ONT and new holes in your home, is now limited, because they want to get rid of the copper completely, as Virgin Media have.

A safety issue is that the exchange used to provide battery backup, so in the event of power cut you could still dial 999. The DVA instructions helpfully say “so make sure you’ve got another way to call for help in an emergency“. There are battery backup options for the DVA, but you’d need to spend around £50 to get one, and it’s unclear how the other two boxes in the chain are kept alive, and who will change, and ecologically dispose of, those long-forgotten batteries when they quietly expire a few years later.

So, let’s look at the benefits:

• Call quality is better.
• You no longer need phone extensions, you can put the phone almost anywhere, like cordless phones you’re used to.
• Faster broadband.
• There are services available that offer to convert, (or “port” in the jargon) your land-line number to the new tech, which can allow it to be used more flexibly, for example as an additional number on a mobile. It would seem best to investigate options long before the cut-off date. Here’s a link to a long-established provider that can port UK land-line numbers, there are others, including Virgin Media, of course.
• A DVA uses DECT technology to communicate to the BT Hub: range is better than Wi-Fi.  (But that means that you also need a BT Hub to be able to use a DVA. If you want to use another router because it has some facilities you need, you’ll need run – and power – both).
• The fibre connection (ONT) inside your home is more compact than it once was, due to recent improvements.

Overall, the message is clear: This sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut “DVA” approach is really too piecemeal, energy intensive and expensive, at around £55 a year to run the kit solely for a landline – they really don’t want you to keep using them in the traditional way.