Improve phone options in rural areas, BT told

Ofcom says people in rural areas must be able to call emergency services during energy blackouts

BT has been told it must give rural people better solutions for contacting emergency services when storms cause power cuts, after digital-only phones were rendered useless by strong winds last winter. Ofcom wrote to BT after storms left some communities without power for days, asking it as a “matter of urgency” to find back-up options for phones that depend on an internet connection rather than old copper wires. BT has since stopped the digital-only phone rollout.

BT HAS been told that rural people must be able to call the emergency services when storms cause power cuts, after digitalonly phones were rendered useless by strong winds last winter.

Ofcom wrote to BT after storms left some communities without power for days, asking the company as a “matter of urgency” to find new backup options for phones that depend on an internet connection rather than old copper wires. BT has subsequently stopped the rollout of its digitalonly phones.

It has asked BT and smaller providers to come up with longerlasting solutions so that hundreds of thousands of affected customers will still be able to call for help during blackouts.

Following Storm Arwen in December, the Government deployed the Army to parts of northeast England and Scotland after 15,000 people were forced to wait more than a week for electricity companies to restore power. Storm Eustice also knocked out the power in some communities for days.

Many people in rural areas with BT’S “Digital Voice” lines were left unable to call emergency services or get a signal on their mobile phones. A petition in Aberdeenshire dismissed backup battery packs that the firm had provided to residents as “chocolate fireguards” that “last only one hour”.

Amid fears that climate change will make extreme weather more common, BT has since paused the rollout of Digital Voice. Philip Jansen, the telecoms giant’s chief executive, said that the company is examining new options to ensure customers stay connected.

This could include “hybrid” landlines that act like mobiles during power cuts, longerlasting battery packs for the home and minigenerators for the greencoloured street cabinets that provide broadband to households.

Mr Jansen said: “After those storms, it became clear to us that there are certain segments of the customer base, and they were typically rural, elderly people who relied on their fixed line, who were out of power for a long period of time, who realised that they had Digital Voice, so they might not have the security of supply and communications that they thought they had.

“It’s certain locations, which are very remote, where there’s a high chance of losing power and there’s a high chance it can’t be recovered quickly.

“So we’re talking to the power companies about how they can restore power more quickly, and how we might provide some sort of backup. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people, not millions, so it’s a small number – but we want to get it right.”

Mr Jansen said the vast majority of customers who switch from analogue to Digital Voice calls have no problems and that, before the rollout was paused, the company had been switching over hundreds of thousands per week.

“We’ll fix it and get back to doing it because that’s all of the legacy stuff we’ve got to turn off, all the analog,” he said. “We shouldn’t be on analogue voice, we’re all on our way to Internet Protocol voice in a digital world.”

Digital phone lines are cheaper to use than analogue lines, particularly for international calls, and the fibre cables they run on are more efficient and easier for BT to maintain than copper ones.

Businesses are increasingly adopting them because they allow employees to work from anywhere using the same telephone number. However, the quality of calls is constrained by the strength of a customer’s internet access and the phone line, and the street cabinets they rely on need local power to work.

Analogue phones only need a small amount of power and the cables, which are often buried, get power from the nearest BT exchange, which will usually have backup power during outages. This means they often keep working during power cuts whereas digital lines are more vulnerable.

Ofcom confirmed the regulator had asked BT to examine longerlasting options for rural customers. He added: “We’ve been very concerned to hear about the experiences of some people being switched to digital lines so we wrote to the major phone companies as a matter of urgency, to remind them of their obligations.

“Telecoms firms must take steps to identify customers who depend on their landline, and make sure they have the support they need.”