A CALAMITY that played out in rural Scotland last winter could be repeated in other isolated parts of Britain – unless there is determined public and media vigilance and raucous protest to head off the threat.
It was during an evening last November that an elderly man’s house caught fire half a mile from a remote Aberdeenshire village. Without near neighbours, and with little or no mobile phone signal, he needed a landline to call 999.
But stupidly, and dangerously, his telecoms company had not long before taken away that traditional lifeline.
They had pulled the plug on his ever-dependable conventional phone and dumped him in a brave new world of digital gadgetry. Scandalously, the technology he was landed with turned out to be disastrously unfit for purpose.
The fire broke out after a storm cut off the his electricity. Power-cuts don’t affect traditional landline telephones. They carry on as normal, so that if this pensioner hadn’t been caught up in the switch to digital he would have been able to phone for help.
As it was, the blackout disabled the new-fangled device installed by the telecoms firm. They had given the man a wireless phone – known as Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP). These are totally tied in with the broadband internet network and, without electricity, that link is instantly severed.
Unable to raise the alarm, the pensioner’s house burnt down.
For the wilds of Scotland, we can read, for example, the innumerable remote homesteads of mid and north Wales, and take warning that they are included in an ill-considered plan by telecommunications companies to move all 29 million UK homes on to the VOIP by 2025.
A RINGING EXAMPLE OF RAMPANT CAPITALISM
THUS, WITHIN a mere three years from now, firms including BT and Virgin propose to switch off the technology that currently powers landlines in the most remote parts of Wales, where mobile-phone signals can be weak, or non-existent, where neighbours may be far-flung and emergency services many miles dietant. The very places where a solid and reliable conventional phone is a lifeline in emergencies, as well as a comforting and dependable defence against social isolation, a non-fickle connection with the outside world.
The Scottish pensioner’s tragic tale is just one repercussion, so far, of the telecoms industry’s blinkered rush to trash the secure and dependable analogue network, and to replace it with a system proven to be useless whenever there are power-cuts. Frequent blackouts are becoming increasingly likely because climate disruption is triggering more, and more severe, storms. Though power-failures can of course happen for a variety of other reasons, including, potentially, cyber-attacks. In any such eventuality, VOIP is a dead duck.
Telecoms companies say the copper lines used by conventional phones will soon become too expensive to maintain. In the case of BT Group plc, the largest provider of fixed-line, broadband and mobile services in the UK,
a British multinational with operations in about 180 countries, you just want to say: “Oh, come on, pull the other leg…”
Take Openreach, the BT subsidiary which maintains phone-cables and the rest of the paraphernalia that connect nearly all homes and businesses in the UK to the telephone and broadband networks. In the first six months of last year alone, Openreach reported pre-tax profit of…£1billion.
With surpluses of that order, it’s plainly ludicrous to put up maintenance costs as an excuse to scrap landlines. This is no more than a frenzied drive to generate ever more excessive gains. Despite a consequent loss of assured day-to-day telephone communication and – as the Scottish pensioner’s experience shows – a real risk to public safety and well-being. All in all, a ringing example of high-handed capitalism.
Faced with escalating complaints by worried customers, BT has temporarily paused the VOIP roll-out, intending to restart it “once we’re more confident that the right products and solutions are in place that will provide more resilient connectivity. Probably later this year or early next.”
And how, practically, do you achieve such resilience faced with ever more furious Atlantic super-storms, which are rather adept at sweeping aside power-lines as if they were gossamer threads? Oh, no problem, BT consumer CEO Marc Allera tells us. His company will “work with energy providers on faster power restoration”. Oh yeah? So try telling that to those engineers who slave away in atrocious weather to fix downed electricity poles and lines but, despite herculean efforts, take sometimes days, even weeks, to complete the job.
And what of the real possibility thatcyber-hackers may take an interest in targeting civil infrastructure, including power supplies? BT is silent on that score.
Ultimately, this pause in operations may be no more than an expression of hope that the laser of public displeasure will in time be switched off, and the money-making exercise will be quietly resumed.
BT possesses the “solutions”? We would indeed be naive in the extreme to take that assurance on trust.
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Bronterre News 