Will plusnet provide a voip landline service?

[#1]

(plus a one-off £40 porting-in fee I think?)

Its only £15😀

[#2]

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@rmappleby wrote:

..... but more importantly decouples and gives me control of the phone number in the future.

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I think this is key, given all the uncertainty around the ability to retain a reliable and long-standing phone number.  There are a lot of people that rely on landline phones, and not just the elderly, either.  Our nearest neighbours are close to our age, yet they don't use mobile phones (not a lot of point here anyway) and they don't use the internet.  Their connectivity to the outside world is long wave radio (can't get DAB, MW or FM here), their landline phone (they've had the same number for around 50 years or more) and their only concession to the modern world, satellite TV (can't get terrestrial TV here either).

[#3]

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@MisterW wrote:

(plus a one-off £40 porting-in fee I think?)

Its only £15😀

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Even better! 😁

[#4]

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@JSHarris wrote:
Our nearest neighbours are close to our age, yet they don't use mobile phones (not a lot of point here anyway) and they don't use the internet.  Their connectivity to the outside world is long wave radio (can't get DAB, MW or FM here), their landline phone (they've had the same number for around 50 years or more) and their only concession to the modern world, satellite TV (can't get terrestrial TV here either).

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Blimey, where do you live to have such a massive "not-spot" for all known forms of broadcast?

[#5]

There are many places where DAB is a problem and I could imagine that there are valleys and gorges in Wales, Debryshire and the peak district and perhaps some of the UK's islands that might be struggle for FM and TV signals. Not sure about Scotland, but I must admit that not having MW did surprise me.

[#6]

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@rmappleby wrote:
Blimey, where do you live to have such a massive "not-spot" for all known forms of broadcast

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About 14 miles from a fairly large city in the South West, but in a small hamlet that's at the bottom of a steep sided valley.  Pretty much every village and hamlet around here is without terrestrial TV or mobile phone connectivity.  We used to be able to get analogue TV, but it was never great.  I had a high gain aerial, with a masthead amplifier, and that just about got a signal, but when TV switched to digital everyone around here lost TV.  Caused a heck of a stir with the planners, as we all had to get planning consent to fit satellite dishes, and being inside an AONB and conservation area the planning people didn't like that one bit!

For a while I got around the planners stupidity by having the dish on a pole in the garden (don't need planning consent to do that!).  Eventually the numbskulls came around and granted an exemption, so we can all now have dishes mounted to the wall, as long as they aren't at the front of the house..

This isn't an unusual situation in rural England.  The majority of older settlements will be alongside streams (as ours is).  Our little hamlet has been inhabited for a few thousand years, because it made sense to live alongside a reliable chalk stream water supply.  Streams always run along the bottom of valleys, so that makes high frequency radio comms near-impossible.  Our nearest phone mast transmits in band 20 (~800MHz) and band 3 (1800MHz).  There's no chance of an 1800MHz signal getting down here, but we can just about get the 800MHz signal, using a 12ft mast with a couple of high gain directional aerials at the top.

The phone masts are prioritised to cover large towns and cities, major roads and railway tracks.  That leaves massive gaps in coverage right across the UK.  Only around 10% of the population, but if you're in that 10% then it's little comfort to constantly hear that coverage is 90%, as if that's good.  Landline phones were installed everywhere, even in the most remote parts of the UK, so going from having a fairly reliable way to call for help (as we've been able to do for decades) to no way to do so is a bit galling.

[#7]

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@rmappleby wrote:

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@MisterW wrote:

(plus a one-off £40 porting-in fee I think?)

Its only £15😀

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Even better! 😁

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Nope !

£15.00 = "Phone line takeover for broadband service (no calls, must have NTE5)"

£44.40 = "Port broadband landline number to VoIP"

As written on my first bill from A&A, where broadband switched last Tuesday, and my VoIP activated about 20 minutes ago.

.

[#8]

Ouch. But of course, it makes complete sense. Everything's getting more information dense, so the frequency needs to go up, so everything becomes more and more line of sight only. Like @Batphone though, I'm surprised you don't even get MW. It would really help if the powers that be would prioritise running some nice high bandwidth fibre into hamlets like yours, rather than over provisioning big metropolitan areas. But that would probably require subsidies, and those are mostly a bad word these days

[#9]

@Anonymous you were charged incorrectly then

'Port a single pstn number to voip' £15

https://www.aa.net.uk/voice-and-mobile/number-porting/port-numbers/

Unless yours was a renumber and export , once your existing service had been transferred to A & A ?

[#10]

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@rmappleby wrote:

 It would really help if the powers that be would prioritise running some nice high bandwidth fibre into hamlets like yours, rather than over provisioning big metropolitan areas. But that would probably require subsidies, and those are mostly a bad word these days

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Without wishing to invoke the dreaded Brexit, I'd say you were absolutely spot on.  My family are mostly from rural Ireland and they have far, far better comms than we do here, almost entirely as a consequence of subsidies (and you don't need to be a rocket scientist to guess where they've come from !).

Like it or not, the UK is a profit driven entity, where if there is no profit to be had then key services just aren't available.  Even getting an ambulance here inside an hour is somewhat unusual, and our fire service is 100% reliant on local volunteers.  What's maddening is that we pay above average council tax, yet get poorer public services than those that pay less in the city. 

Better not get me started on the state of our roads.  We just don't get road repairs done here at all.  The only repairs to our lane have been goodwill pothole filling by a local farmer, who has to drive our lane to get to his fields.  The council have never carried out any repairs in all the years we've lived here.

Having said all that we do have a low crime rate and anti-social behaviour is unknown.  It's also very dark at night here (street lights are banned - we're in a Dark Skies area) and very quiet.  The most prominent noise we have is the sound of the stream running alongside our garden, and maybe the bark of a fox at night.  Mind you, I could do without the deer trampling our veggie patch, or the otter that took all the fish from our pond last year.

[#11]

The £44.40 charge with A&A is for in renumber and export rather than porting a number to their VOIP service: https://www.aa.net.uk/voice-and-mobile/number-porting/port-your-landline-voip/

[#12]

I'm not a farmer but have been a 'good-will pot-hole filler'.

Living at the end of a private track (legal access agreement in place, lodged on relevant property deeds at the Land Registry) where the track owner shows zero inclination to effect any track repairs (but have a legal right to apportion costs to people with shared access rights should they decide to do so). Spoil (i.e. re-used MOT chippings) used to fill the biggest holes. Then there's the level crossing, which I had to repeatedly prompt for repairs as the woodwork between the ironwork was rotting away (and breaking up);  not conducive to normal vehicular access (even at the low levels that use such access). I'm not replacing that sort of stuff with a quiet (but operating) rail-line. So maintenance over privately owned is seemingly no better than public owned (unless a willing/capable third party 'subsidises' it).

A 3rd-party fibre supplier approached me when I went shopping. After I'd fully described that the cables would be via poles (through woodland) and then through ducting under a railway line (ducting whch hasn't been 'explored' since the original copper lines were put it) and then back up a (leaning and condemned) BT pole for an onwward journey he seemed rather less keen on attracting a new customer.

[#13]

The subject of this thread is: ' Will plusnet provide a voip landline service?' This has been answered numerous times.

It has now gone way off topic into posts more suitably located on the General Chat board.

Moderator's Note

This topic has been answered and the thread locked.