I live and work in Mildenhall, Suffolk, and this area was chosen to be one of two trial areas where the telephone exchanges were to be switched over to ‘all digital’ in 2023 before rolling the scheme out over the rest of the country by the end of 2025. We went over to ‘all digital’ later than planned, because of a lot of confusion and many predictable problems, but it did eventually happen by the end of 2023. The relevant authorities said that lessons had been learned, but then they always say that when their poorly considered schemes go wrong. One of the main problems was that a lot of broadband and telephone service providers didn’t seem to know that it was happening in Mildenhall by the end of 2023, and kept telling their customers that there was no problem because it was not happening until 2025. Wrong!
A couple of days ago I visited a lady who had been out of the country for a few months, and she had been sent a new Plusnet router that she wanted me to set up. Everything went fine to begin with, but when I plugged her cordless phone into the socket on the back of the router marked ‘Digital voice customers only’, nothing happened. There was no dial tone, and the handset said ‘Check Phone Line’. After spending a short time trying to work out what wrong, we decided to get in touch with Plusnet. Service providers these days try every possible tactic to avoid actually talking to customers, but after going through the usual tortuous menu system on their helpline, we quickly got through to an adviser. When we asked what could be happening, the adviser told us that Plusnet do not provide VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) digital telephone services, and had no plans to do so, which was very surprising.
Apparently a lot of other Plusnet customers in the area have switched to BT, because they do provide digital voice services as well as broadband. However, BT are considerably more expensive than Plusnet, so I advised my client to carry on with a broadband-only service from Plusnet and use her mobile telephone for making and receiving calls, rather than sign up for a landline-based telephone service with BT. The old landline-based telephone service used to continue working during power cuts, so it had that advantage, but the new digital telephone service will not work during a power cut, so that one significant benefit no longer exists. If the power to a property disappears, you will have to fall back to using a mobile telephone anyway. Although I am not a conspiracy theorist, I can’t help wondering if BT, who owns Plusnet, is deliberately trying to drive customers away from basic ‘low-end’ services and towards their own, more expensive, services.