I have a Galaxy A14 smartphone on an EE pay-monthly contract that I manage for a disabled relative. Their last couple of phone bills have each been more than £90 and when I looked into it, this was because they were using Directory Enquiries to get the numbers they wanted to call. I explained how to store popular numbers in the phone but this was too much hassle for them, especially as they never saw the phone bill, even though each enquiry was costing between £5 and £12!
I’d set a spend cap of £20, so why wasn’t this kicking in? Because calls to Directory Enquiries are excluded from the price cap. What? Other companies such as O2 do include such calls.
But that wasn’t all. When I logged into my account, it stated that the contract was unlimited calls, 5 GB data ‘£25 per month’, yet I was being charged £36 per month plus £50 directory enquiries!!!
When I asked how this could be, I was told that ‘Unlimited calls … £25 per month..’ was the name of the contract, not the amount.
This is absurd. It is as if I advertised a plane ticket to the USA as ‘a £200 everything included’ ticket, and then sent the client a bill for £1,000, saying ‘You should have read the small print, Sir! £200 is the name of the ticket, not the price!!’ Can you believe it?? And EE is a company owned by BT, who clearly no longer seem to believe in British values.
That is all bad enough, but it got even worse. Their app gave some blurb about how much I could save on mobile phone contracts with them, because I was an EE home broadband customer. So I asked the guy on the phone what was the best deal he could offer me. He claimed that he had a really good deal that included a Samsung Tablet for only £28 per month on a 2-year contract. I reminded him that my relative can’t use a tablet and I already have an iPad. After pressing him, he offered a series of slightly cheaper deals, but I got too distressed by his attempts to be clever and hung up after telling him that I would go into an EE or O2 shop.
There, I got a deal for unlimited calls and data on a rolling monthly contract for £16 a month. I’m not saying I couldn’t have got something even cheaper if I’d shopped around, but this was less than half the price I’d been paying and without a long-term buy-in.
I can’t express how disappointed I am by their marketing tactics, plus I no longer have any trust in them. How the mighty are fallen!
Storm Goretti on Thursday 8th January 2026 brought winds of 99 mph and left more than 200,000 home without power at its peak: some villages were without power for more than four days. The damage included many fallen trees and burst water mains, leaving over 30,000 properties without water.
An Ofcom report says that for outages of an hour, two thirds of the population would be able to make emergency calls using their mobile phones, but for outages of six hours the number would be ‘far smaller’ – but the actual number is redacted from the report. Few mobile masts have multi-hour batteries or generator capacity.
There is concern that in such circumstances, it would be difficult for emergency services to contact their own staff, as neither mobile phones nor radio can function for long on batteries.
Indeed, few people have battery-powered televisions (lap-tops and tablets mainly use wifi rather than GPRS for wireless comms), although many people will have battery-powered radios in their cars
So, the loss of battery-powered telephone exchanges has significantly reduced the resilience of our comms system in emergency situations.
AS of September 2025, OpenReach has 5,600 telephone exchanges, but only about 1,000 will be needed for ‘Fibre Broadband’ services.
So far, only three legacy exchanges have been closed as part of a pilot programme (Deddington, Ballyclare and Kenton Road) and the next 12 for closure have been announced. These are mainly along the Thames valley, with some in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Another 106 are listed for imminent closure and as far as I can tell, these spread out from these places. Some closures have been delayed due to active use. It has proved to be quite difficult to move some people, especially those using some body-worn alarms, onto fibre connections, partly because these need back up power during supply outages. Some non-BT providers have been fined for failing to ensure a smooth changeover.
Internet of Things (IoT)
I’m aware that in my locality, they have been upgrading all the traffic lights to use the GSM network to communicate with the central traffic control computers, presumably because the copper landlines are being decommissioned. This is proving quite disruptive, as workmen progress around the various pedestrian crossings and road junctions, using sometimes badly-programmed or faulty temporary lights to control traffic whilst they do the work.
This is especially annoying in the Epsom area, where the gas and water companies are also closing roads to do their work, and most recently, major excavations to instal HV cables from the grid sub-stations to boost the electricity supply network.
I don’t think this is all caused by a change-over to green technology – population growth and lifestyle changes, such as working from home, are also a factor.
Live Facial Recognition
But I’m also finding myself concerned about ‘Live Facial Recognition’ which is being used in my town. They say they’re only looking for criminals, but as part of that, they’re intending to start using the entire passport database, not just ‘wanted’ criminals.
I remember a QC (and part-time judge) to whom I was giving technical advice saying to me, ‘Just because you’re innocent, don’t imagine you won’t be found guilty’ and he then described situations where that had happened to his clients. In one case, the guilty ‘offender’ was no more than an innocent passer-by outside a pub when a brawl burst out onto the street. The police were already in attendance and arrested him for affray. He was found guilty by magistrates but was acquitted on appeal.
Mobile providers are switching off the 3G networks to make room for the more advanced 4G and 5G networks. 4G and 5G are said to give customers better, faster and more reliable services.
Providers are switching off their networks at different times
Each mobile provider is setting its own timetable for its 3G network switch-off. These timings might change and you should check your mobile provider’s website for the latest update:
109 years since the first automatic telephone exchange in England was installed in Epsom, its decommissioning has started. Yesterday, 2nd June 2021, I was switched to ‘Digital Voice’ delivered over fibre to my house, and my copper landline was taken out of service. All I had to do was to unplug the phone from the wall socket and plug it into the back of the ‘Smart Hub’ which has an ordinary telephone socket for this purpose.
So far the only difference to me is that my extension bell no longer works. I might see if I can connect back to the extension bell and if so I will update this blog. Nevertheless , it is a historic day.
I’ve previously noted that the existing PSTN copper-wire telephone network is due to be retired by the end of 2025. Although this may seem impossibly ambitious, given that’s only 3½ years away, it seems that the intention is not to rip out the copper network – this will remain in place for years to come – but to provide the telephone service over the broadband signal, which might come via the existing copper network or via fibre to the premises if you have that fitted.
Openreach Retiring the copper network say that there are 221 locations where they will stop selling ‘copper’ products between now and the end of the year, and from September 2023, you’ll only be able to get a digital phone, although delivered via the copper network where full fibre isn’t available.
They’re planning to connect 20 million homes to full-fibre, including 3.2 million premises in ‘harder to reach’ areas.
Salisbury was the first ‘fully-fibred’ city in June 2020, taking a year to reach more than 20,000 premises. By ‘reaching’ premises, it means that there is a connector on the building, but it will not be until 2022 that everyone is switched over.
But the thing I just don’t get is the cost of the ‘landline’ service. In fact, their website no longer has ‘landline’ as a headline service – it comes under ‘Broadband’.
‘Pay-As-You-Go’ is £21 a month ‘line rental’ plus 21 p a minute for calls. You can get 700 minutes of calls for an extra £7 per month. But I remember getting stung by this some years ago when our only use of the landline was my partner making a 2-hour call to a friend once per month. After the first hour, the cost went up to 20p a minute, so cost an extra £12! So 120 minutes once a month cost £19. Their prices just aren’t competitive with a mobile phone deal – they’ve lost interest in their traditional business, and must be trying to price it out of existence.
Abandoning Landlines – June 2024
Since I wrote this post in April 2021, it is clear that BT have indeed all but abandoned the traditional landline. They now call it a ‘Home Phone’. ‘Pay as you go’ line rental is £28.40 a month, rising yearly with inflation. Plus it seems you pay a call set-up fee of about 30 p plus a call charge of 20 p per minute. It’s £46.40 per month for unlimited UK calls. International calls now cost up to 157 p per minute! At these prices, they aren’t even trying to compete with mobile phones and they really only want to sell broadband. Perhaps this shows just how expensive it is to install digital (fibre) lines.
Today I received a letter from BT explaining that my phone would shortly be switching to ‘Digital Voice’. Their letter says that the phone service will be delivered through my broadband connection rather than my old copper phone line (cheerio Dixon of Dock Green!). I do have ‘full fibre to the premises’ so the copper wires are essentially redundant in my case. There is a socket on the back of the ‘smart home hub’ for ‘Digital Voice’ which takes any standard phone plug, so anyone could do the changeover. Obviously the smart hub can still be used for voice even if your broadband is delivered over the copper pair. BT can disconnect the copper pair at the telephone exchange as the broadband signal is injected at a street cabinet. What a change from the dozens of pairs of humming copper wires strung from pole to pole that I remember from my youth, although the thick, black, fibre cables are just as unsightly.
They warn you that if you have a burglar alarm or ‘pendant’ (personal safety) alarm, you shouldn’t change yet. Presumably these might require power from the phone line.
There is one issue that they studiously ignore – if you have hard-wired extensions, or an extension bell, these will not work as they rely on wiring from your landline socket, which will be deactivated.
There is an acknowledgement of this hidden away on their help pages, suggesting that you don’t changeover yet. It is clear that if you need phones in several rooms, they expect you to use cordless phones which will use the DECT wireless system.
They also acknowledge that if your power goes off, your smart hub and ‘digital voice’ connection will cease to work. I’m assuming that given that the vast majority of people now have a mobile phone, BT feels that this is no longer the risk it used to be. (I remember the instructions that accompanied the rotary dial telephones, explaining how to dial 999 when in a blackout or smoke-filled room!)
I suppose that preparing for the changeover will cost BT quite a bit, but there will be huge savings from not having to maintain all the digital switching equipment and all those unreliable copper wire connections, not to mention the huge amount of power needed to run the old system.
So it is looking like the time is coming to bid the PSTN to RIP.
Implementation of Digital Voice temporarily paused – 29/03/2022
BT has paused its plans to replace landline phones with digital ones. The company said the decision was made following feedback from customers, with the Chief Executive admitting BT had ‘got it wrong’ in a public statement. The rollout, which saw copper landlines replaced in favour of fibre-optic cables, resulted in some customers, including those living in rural areas and pensioners, being unable to call emergency services during stormy weather across the country earlier in the year, when some people were without power for days
BT and other telecom companies had pledged to equip all homes with digital “voice over internet phones” by 2025 as part of an update to the UK’s communication infrastructure.
The bleak reality for too many living in rural areas is they are not yet in a position to move over to digital to carry out every day functions, even if they wanted to.
Those who live and work in the countryside should not be subject to a communications blackout and are pleased to see that BT has listened to the concerns of many of its customers.
Marc Allera, BT’s chief executive of consumer brands, apologised and said BT had “underestimated the disruptive impact this upgrade would have”. He added that “in hindsight” the technology had been rolled out “too early”.
According to The Telegraph, some two million customers have already had their landlines removed to make way for the new systems, with around 160,000 forced to make the switch on average each month since the roll out started in April last year. The rollout will continue once the issues are resolved.
Mr. Allera’s statement added: “We will aim to re-start once we have key solutions in place to provide our customers with more resilient connectivity.
These include:
Hybrid phones that can switch to a mobile network and have an in-built, long-lasting battery.
The option of longer-lasting battery back-up units for customers who want or need them.
Providing in-home ‘mobile landlines’ for people without broadband.
Addressing so-called mobile ‘not-spots’, with continued investment in the Shared Rural Network. We’ve recently announced a further 1,500 locations that will get better coverage as a result.
Launching an awareness campaign so that our customers better understand the need to switch.
Continuing to proactively engage the related industries – like healthcare pendants and burglar alarm providers to ensure our most vulnerable customers continue to get the service they need.
And we’re continuing to work on other things, too, including advancements to scam-call shielding and fraud reduction tools, that we know are becoming ever more important to our users of landlines.
I would comment that many rural areas have very poor mobile signals and that mobile masts will presumably fail if they get no power, so whilst mobile switchover will help when the broadband network fails, it will still not have the resilience of the old landline system, which had its own power supply.
New Deadline (Oops!) – Update 20/05/2024
BT has now abandoned its deadline of completing the national switchover by the end of 2025, and will instead aim to complete the move by the end of January 2027.
There is particular concern of ensuring that ‘Vulnerable Customers’ will not lose service, especially of items like personal alarms. These will need battery backup and/or switchover to the mobile network to ensure service during power failures, and will need to be easy for vulnerable people to use. Apparently, BT are not always able to identify such customers.
To finish installing my security camera, I need to drill a hole through a 9-inch wall. I happen to have a long 8 mm masonry drill, and some ‘CAT 5e’ cable, but there’s no way that an Ethernet (RJ45) plug will go through an 8 mm hole, so I will have to fit plugs on each end.
How do you wire an RJ45 plug?
Well if you think about it, in theory there will be a correct electrical connection as long as you connect the same colours to the same pins at both ends. But that won’t be satisfactory for high-speed data transfer. A Cat 5e cable contains 4 ‘twisted pairs’, i.e. eight wires, for a reason. Each pair carries a different part of the Ethernet signal and each pair of wires is twisted together because this helps to reduce the pick up of electrical ‘noise’ from stray signals. This includes pick-up of signals from the other pairs (called ‘cross-talk’), and electric fields from nearby mains cables, radio signals, noisy electric motors and the like. So the first thing is to ensure that you keep the pairs together. They are easy to identify as each pair consists of one wire with a ‘solid’ colour and one white wire with that solid colour striped along it.
Now, you might think that in the plug, the pairs would be laid in the sequence solid colour/ dotted colour side by side. But they’re not. It seems that the original sequence was arranged so that you could use plugs with just one pair, with two pairs and so on. So the first pair occupies the central two pins, and the next pair takes the next two pins outside the central two, and so on. This is called ‘USOC’ and is convenient where you often don’t need many pairs. But it resulted in the ‘positive’ connections being on one side of the plug and the ‘negative’ connections being on the other side of the plug, which is not ideal for rejection of stray signal pickup, because the pairs of wires are separated in the plug. So they came up with a system that kept the primary pair in the centre of the plug, the second pair straddling each side of the first pair (so the same as the original USOC wiring) and the other two pairs are kept together each side of the central two pairs. Quite logical. This is called T568-A and was used for ISDN (telephone) wiring. Indeed a small (two-pair RJ11) jack plug can plug into an RJ45 4-pair socket and will work if it is wired for a telephone.
However, it discovered that there is less cross-talk between the data pairs when pairs 2 and 3 are swapped in the plug. This is called T568-B. Pair 3 now straddles the central pair 1, pair 2 is on pins 1 & 2, and pair 4 is on pins 7 and 8. To ensure that the colours alternate across the plug, the white stripy one of the pair is first and the solid colour is second. Except for pair 1 where the solid colour is first.
The T568-B arrangement should now be used for new data cabling for this reason.
Ethernet Wiring Pairs (not the wiring order in the plug)
As an aside, going back to the telephone jack-plug days, in each pair the white stripy wire is the ‘tip’ and is positive, and the solid colour is the ‘ring’ and is negative. USOC stands for ‘Universal Service Ordering Code’. It was originally developed by Bell Telephones in the 1970s and used in the RJ-11 (two-pair) jack plug for example, to connect telephones to the network.
Which Ethernet pair is which?
Pair 1 is blue
Pair 2 is orange
Pair 3 is green
Pair 4 is brown
This does not follow the resistor colour code, sadly!
What are the pairs used for?
This depends on the system that they are connected to. For Ethernet up to 100 Mbps, then using the abbreviation Tx for Transmit and Rx for Receive:
Pair 2 (orange) is Rx at the Modem and Tx at the computer
Pair 3 (green) is the Tx at the Modem and Rx at the computer
The other pairs are spare (but may be used for power)
As previously mentioned, the plugs at both ends are normally wired identically: the distinction between transmit and receive pairs is handled within the devices – the modem or switch can automatically detect which pair is Rx and which is Tx. However, when connecting two computers directly by a single cable, they might both try to transmit on one pair and to receive on the other pair. This won’t work, so you might need a ‘crossover’ cable to fix this.
For Gigabit Ethernet, all four pairs are used. Each pair carries a bi-directional signal. Gigabit Ethernet does not require a higher operating frequency – it transmits more data by using all four pairs bi-directionally (to send and receive). This needs a much more sophisticated modulation system.
It also means that you can’t mix Ethernet systems connected on a single cable –many Ethernet switches will revert to the slowest system on the network, although ‘smart’ switches contain additional electronics to ‘buffer’ data when connecting from a slow system to a fast system, and thus don’t slow everything down. One of the easiest ways to speed up a network is to install a ‘smart switch’.
[I will need to write separately about network switches – these are clever boxes for connecting devices on the same network.]
Power over Ethernet (PoE)
Devices using the Ethernet will need some sort of power for their electronic circuits. For peripheral devices that don’t need much power, such as security cameras and telephones, it makes sense to supply the power via the Ethernet cable. For speeds up to 100 Mbps, the spare pairs can be used for power, but for Gigabit, power is supplied on the data pairs. For this reason, care is needed when supplying PoE as this might cause an issue with an old device that doesn’t expect it. The PoE voltage is 48 v and usually limited to around 10 w per device. However, ‘intelligent’ switches can adapt between various modes of operation.
Types of Ethernet cable
There are several different types of Ethernet cable. The most usual is UTP cable, standing for ‘Unshielded Twisted Pair’. FTP cable has each pair shielded by a metal foil. It is also possible that the whole cable is shielded by braiding or a foil. If the whole cable is unshielded, this is designated as U/UTP. If each pair and the whole cable is shielded with metal foil, this is shown as F/FTP. S/FTP is even better protected with a braided sheath around the cable.
CAT5e vs CAT6
Why bother with CAT5e when you can have CAT6? The wiring of the cables is identical, but CAT6 is designed to have lower cross-talk and less signal loss, so it can work at higher frequencies. A CAT6 cable often has an internal PVC separator to keep the pairs correctly positioned. However a CAT5e cable is fine for Gigabit Ethernet. A CAT6 cable can support 10 Gigabit Ethernet, which is more than common network hardware can use, although it might be more future-proof, especially in office environments.
It’s worth noting that you can’t always tell the effective transmission rate of a network – if the network is noisy or lossy, then it has to keep resending ‘messages’ and if this gets excessive, it will become too slow to be useful. In this case, a slower transmission rate will be much more effective. Some smart switches have network analysis capabilities which can help with troubleshooting network bottlenecks.
How long can an Ethernet cable be?
Generally speaking, a Cat5e twisted pair cable can run at 100 Mbps over lengths of up to 100 m. Different cable designs or signal repeaters can be used for greater distances.
Well, on 14th October, BT came again to fit the Fibre to the Premises. But again, despite my reminders, they didn’t send a cherry-picker, or hoist as they call it. But this time the engineer called the depot and managed to get them to agree to send one first thing the next day. He did fit the optical modem and downlead, however, and the next morning, the cherry-picker came and they strung the fibre across from the pole to the house – probably only 10 metres. [Surprisingly, they left the landline on the old copper cable, so this hasn’t changed at all, and it does mean that we still have a phone line should there be a power failure, which seems to occur more than it used to.]
Then an ordinary Ethernet cable runs through the eaves cupboard to the ‘smart hub’.
Is it good?
Well, the speed over wifi to my mobile phone is 86 Mb/s down and 68 Mb/s up. This is good for wi-fi especially as I have a lot of wireless equipment running in my office. The ‘Smart Hub’ no longer shows the ‘sync speed’, but instead takes you to the online BT test. I had a struggle to log in, but eventually it told me that I was getting a download speed of 498 Mb/s. It doesn’t show an upload speed though. An ‘independent’ speed test to my PC shows 93 Mb/s down and 71 Mb/s up with 2 ms latency. I can believe these speeds.
So, is it worth it? Well, we manage to have multiple Zoom meetings running at the same time with no lag or freezing, so yes, it is worth it. I’ve also got a new security camera running over the internet. We also watch most of our telly on ‘catch up’ or we download films. So at the price I’m paying, it is definitely worth it. But BT will have to up their game on installations, or it will become a money loser for them.
One thing I would add is that BT claim for their weirdly-named ‘Halo’ system: ‘Service like you’ve never experienced’. This is a strangely ambiguous strapline, and my experience has done nothing to dispel the negative connotations. I have to appreciate that many people get into a bit of a dither when they have to deal with tech, so their technical help could be useful to many people.
They are also trying to persuade people to take up their mobile phone offer, with inclusive ‘double data’. But after my poor experience with their mobile coverage and their total lack of help to provide me with broadband when I had to temporarily vacate the house during renovations, I shall steer well clear of that.
I’ve been so busy trying to get the renovated house ship-shape that I’ve neglected this blog. But now to revert to an old hobby-horse, BT.
About 18 moths ago, I was writing about the impending demise of the aged hard-wired telephone system, the PSTN. Epsom has a few ‘claims to fame’. One is that it had the first automatic public exchange in the country, opened just over 100 years ago in 1912. But its days are numbered. Epsom been plagued for months by OpenReach vans laying optical fibre to enable ‘fibre to the premises’ service and indeed I got rather upset by ‘Kelly Communications’, who are contractors for OpenReach, festooning cables around and over my garden.
So I was rather expecting the call from BT offering me ‘Fibre to the premises’ giving 500 Mb/s download speed and a somewhat vague upload figure of 75 Mb/s. The guaranteed speeds are not so impressive (250 Mb/s down and 10 Mb/s up), especially as I’d like a faster upload speeds for videos and so on. The price was £60 per month (£5 more than I’m paying for my present ‘fibre to the cabinet’ but in reality, I would pay slightly less as I’m dropping the ‘unlimited anytime calls’ option as we have made no outgoing calls on the landline for over a year! Any calls we do make will now be ‘pay-as-you-go’ but as we both have unlimited mobile calling, we’d only use this in exceptional circumstances.
After agreeing to this, I felt rather bullied by all the ‘don’t forget your appointment’ messages: ‘We are getting ready. Are you?’
The guy turned up on time, and asked where the master socket was. When I showed him, there was a look of dismay. It turns out that they like to terminate the optical fibre on the inside of the house immediately at the point where it enters the premises and to put the optical modem there. But my downlead wanders around the eaves for a considerable distance round several corners then disappears into the eaves and reappears in a room on the opposite side of the house. This appears to be a legacy of alterations to the house and the GPO moving the telegraph pole several times during the ninety years since the house was built. Not ideal as optical fibre isn’t easily jointed and the technician had only been supplied with a limited length.
The other issue is that the optical modem must be close to a power point. (Some of the BT material talks about a battery backup unit, but he said that the Nokia unit they are fitting doesn’t have this, and there was little point since the router (home hub) needs mains power.) I noted that BT has switched from Huawei to Nokia, but ironically the Nokia unit is proudly emblazoned ‘Made in China’!)
As it happens, the best and most convenient route is through an eaves cupboard to the ‘office’ where we want the router, but we have had to ask him to come back as we will have to clear a lot of junk from the cupboard, fit a power point and run a Cat 5 Ethernet cable to the office room. The router can then be fitted in the office.
So what about the telephone service? There is a socket on the ‘Home Hub’ for ‘Phone’ marked ‘For Digital Voice Customers Only’. This looks like an ordinary phone socket, so presumably that is where the phone goes and hopefully it can supply enough current to ring my treasured extension bell! This will mean the end of the power-failure-proof hard-wired phone, but we have been expecting this for some time now.
Annoyingly, clearing the cupboard is another job I have been avoiding, but I suppose it will compel me to get it done.
