Phones moving to digital

[Suff]

The move to all digital is a prelude to Fibre. When you get fibre it is light, not electric, which sends your signals.

I went Fibre back in January 2022. but I had already moved to all digital. My Livebox (router from Orange), has RJ11 sockets (standard digital phone sockets, not the UK one but the international standard), which I simply plugged my 10 year old DECT phone into.

When we went fibre we simply switched one livebox for the other, plugged the DECT phone into the livebox and away it goes.

OK the engineer had to call the internal helpline because they had screwed up the registration of the box, Orange registers your serial number of the Livebox and does auto setup when it is plugged in, but they had it fixed in about 20 minutes.

For me it was a no brainer. I was already on full digital but my network speed was 19:1 and had been trending down to 16:1 and dropping. After the move to fibre the service was 2000/1000. For €3 a month more.

The downside of full digital is that if the power goes off so does your router and your landline. Unless you have a generator or a UPS (Uninterruptible power supply), to power the router, then you are going to be without a phone when you lose power.

In France what they do is offer you a 1 year really cheap mobile phone deal and every time your service goes out they offer you about 200gb of free data on your mobile. But after 1 year they start winding down the cost thumbscrews.

I made these decisions eye's wide open. I have battery power with inverters and I also have a 6kw generator where needed so I can have my phone running even if the power is out. Well assuming the distribution box on the wall outside actually has power, I've never really tried it as we have enough mobiles to go around and the landline is not used that much.

WM is totally right about the mobile switch off. It is the same as them switching off analogue TV And going to digital. It free'd up a huge spectrum of airwaves which had been hogged by intensely bandwidth hogging analogue signals whereas digital could provide hundreds of times the service and also some additional mobile services too.

Progress moves things on. No point in buying a phone which will work for 30 years. The network you talk to won't be there 30 years from now.