THE ludicrously profitable BT Group, together with its currently even more loaded subsidiary Openreach, is behaving quite disgracefully by claiming a need for spending constraint as a reason for trying to push through its new, and potentially life-endangering, internet-based telephones system.
In June, our column in the Cambrian News described how the bullheaded plan by the telecoms behemoth to totally scrap landline phones by 2025 would leave untold numbers of isolated communities at dire risk of being unable to get help in an emergency. The danger was illustrated last winter, when a house in rural Scotland burnt down after its owner, a pensioner, had his dependable landline phone replaced by one of the wireless phones, which are linked with the broadband network and need mains electricity to work. The blaze broke out during a power-cut, and the area is without a mobile-phone signal. Landline phones work during power-cuts. Without his, the pensioner couldn’t call the fire brigade.
The prospect of this kind of nightmare is now hovering over remote parts of rural Wales, which typically have little or no mobile signals and often suffer power-cuts. Moutainous Cwmystwyth, 16 miles from Aberystwyth, is one such place. Here, BT had begun to impose its dratted new Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP) system, clearly without employing an ounce of imagination over its repercussions for this frequently storm-battered place, which has no mobile-phone signal and knows all about blackouts. Demonstrating almost unbelievable heartlessness, let alone arrogance, the new devices were given out with the warning: “You will not be able to call 999 (or any other numbers) from this phone if there is a cut in the electricity supply or if there are broadband problems.
“So make sure you have another way of calling for help in an emergency.”
Feeble BBC Wales responds with mild-manned deference
FACED WITH escalating complaints by indignant customers, BT has temporarily paused the VOIP roll-out. But it may just as well admit the obvious: it’s out to trash the secure and dependable analogue network, and to replace it with a system inherently useless whenever there are power-cuts, or broadband disconnects for any other reason.
It claims the copper lines used in conventional landlines will soon become too expensive to maintain. In the case of BT Group plc, this is a complete nonsense. In the last financial year, they reported a pre-tax profit of £2bn and, in the first six months of last year alone, the figure for Openreach was £1bn. The new phones are all about making even more money.
The media and politicians need to kick up more of a racket about VOIP. BBC Wales, for example, is being puny. The corporation’s charter says its journalism “should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other…news providers.” But a recent online report on the Cwmystwyth fiasco contains zero analysis, and the somewhat forelock-tugging line: “BT emphasizes that we must move to a digital system and away from the old copper lines which are reaching the end of their life.” Nowhere does the BBC charter call for mild-mannered deference.
Bronterre News 