PROBLEM OF THE FORTNIGHT
QI live in a housing estate where most houses were connected up with BT phone lines. Later, Telewest cabled the estate with its coaxial system, which I watched being installed (no copper wires anywhere). This provides broadband and landline-phone services through the same cable, and I am connected to both. This was later taken over by NTL World and eventually by Virgin Media – the current provider. My question is, if I stay on this system will I be affected by the copper landline switch-off? I imagine some of your readers will be in a similar boat, but I haven’t seen any relevant information.
Tom Fry
A This is a good question. The copper switch-off is national policy, driven by the Government and regulator Ofcom, and co-ordinated, in the main, by Openreach (which is an offshoot of BT). The plan is to complete the switch-off by the end of 2025.
Most people who have a landline are connected via Openreach’s analogue network – so most landline users will be affected.
However, ‘most’ is not all. In principle at least, your situation is not quite the same as most. That’s because your particular internet and telephone services almost certainly travel over a technology known as hybrid-fibre coaxial (HFC – pictured below left), which Virgin Media inherited from the numerous companies before it. HFC means one cable for both services, but the landline part still operates in an analogue fashion – in that it’s connected to the exchange.
Regardless of this, in practice, Virgin Media is working in lockstep with the rest of the industry to meet the Government’s target of switching voice- call services over to purely digital systems. This is to meet the regulator’s expectations, but also to achieve the company’s own aim to move away from its older hybrid systems. So, barring any broader policy change, you can expect to be switched over to digital-only voice services that come via a phone-socket adapter that connects to an Ethernet port on your router.
In January this year, the industry paused ‘non-voluntary’ adoption of digital voice-call services in response to concerns raised by consumers and pressure groups. This is not least because digital phone lines aren’t compatible with a whole range of existing ‘telecare’ equipment that rely on existing analogue technology, such as personal-alarm systems that help vulnerable people to live independently –
