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Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq
Well the elderly and disabled people who need panic buttons and such devices probably aren't the target market for superfast pure-fibre broadband... BT still have a universal service obligation to provide copper whether or not VM also roll out FTTP in any given area.
---------- Post added at 14:29 ---------- Previous post was at 14:23 ----------
Sounds like a pretty poorly run area. Mobile can be inherently more reliable than fixed-line copper for a number of reasons, particularly if a mast is fed with underground fibre. On the other hand if an area is remote and accessible only via microwave relays, then it tends to be a lot worse when the weather comes in.
It's rare to get 'Network busy' on a fixed line a) because hardly anyone uses them anybore and b) because they're still running off archaic circuit-switched systems. Plus you don't get 100,000+ people all taking their landlines into the city centre at once at the weekends when they go shopping thus shifting an entire city's worth of load into one tiny area.
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The reason I said "very, very unlikely" is that in the last 10 years the exchange serving my parents house (rural area with no mobile coverage) has lost its external connection at least twice (both times the main BT fibre was hit by digging works). I believe our local mobile mast is probably fed via a microwave link and that could be why it went down (at one point during the storm we were losing BBC radio stations due to the local high power mast's uplink failing during particularly strong gusts).
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Nonetheless mobile can frequently be more resilient than fixed-line. Not always, certainly not with consumer networks, but the 'real' industrial TETRA and GSM-R networks are rock solid. Furthermore if mobile was inherently unreliable, the government wouldn't be seeking to replace the emergency services' dedicated network with rented capacity on public LTE services in future.
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I really wouldn't put it past any government to downgrade the resiliency of even emergency comms in order to save a few quid and I can't see any reason to remove the requirement for phone lines to work during power cuts.