Good morning. Still 3 000+ homes without power up here. And Storm Barra due tomorrow. Scotland all back on I believe.
The compare and contrast between England and Scotland has been stark. In Scotland the network provider has been providing very regular updates to people, has paid for hot food every day and provided feeding stations in the centre of affected towns / villages. In England I know several people who have had nothing and were told by the network operator to stop asking them for the updates they weren't getting.
Yep. Had a friend off 5 days. In a town of more than 13k population. No mobile signal. No information whatsoever. Luckily he had an open fire. It's not been much above freezing and is now nine days in. Scandalous really.
Um. Sympathy yes, and not wanting to deprecate, but what's wrong with a Plain Ordinary Telephone on the landline, or asking a neighbour in a town of 13k, or ordering/going to buy a throwaway phone on a network that is still running?
The longest powercut I ever had was back in the 1990s when it was between 2 and 3 weeks.
POTS is being removed and the network moved to IP (by Dec 2025) so you won't be able to ring on a landline if the power goes off after that date (at the latest).
You'll need a mobile or a battery backup to make phone calls in a power outage.
Interesting to know.
POTS being removed is a real sea change - been there for what now, nearly a century?
1870s for the copper network - although I think the current iteration of PSTN has been around since the 1980s.
It will indeed be a big change. You can see there being problems when the router firmware crashes and someone can't make an emergency call.
I know most people have mobiles these days but we still aren't at 100% signal coverage.
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It will indeed be a big change. You can see there being problems when the router firmware crashes and someone can't make an emergency call.
I know most people have mobiles these days but we still aren't at 100% signal coverage.