VoIP. Is Phone by Wire Nearly Dead?

I have been bombarded by adverts of this kind saying that we need "Never pay a landline phone bill again" and claiming that VoIP is a NEW Technology that the phone companies do not want us to know about! The very strong implication being that we need not pay (around £200 per annum) for Line Rental and can simply swap over to VoIP and save loads of money. As several Forum Members have already observed, we still have to pay for Line Rental if we want a decent low latency, ADSL (Typically 36Mbit/s Download and 10 Mbit/s Upload) cabled Broadband service for our Laptops, PCs, Tablest and Smartphones in our homes. The only current alternative is using your smartphone over a nominal 4G/LTE mobile air interface which means waiting say 10 times as long as ADSL Fibre Broadband to the Street Cabinet, to upload a simple 3 minute 250MB video to 'the cloud' for the purposes of submitting my Smartphone AV recording of the Bass part to a Virtual Choir invitation in May of this year during 'The Lockdown'. This was done by mistake when I had accidentally turned off my WiFi connection to the Router Modem in the Hallway!


Yes 5G is promising even faster access to the WWW than current 4G networks, but we all know that the reality will be poorer phone coverage geographically, significantly less speed than promised on paper and a requirement for many more antenna to support the shorter range that 5G brings. The appropriate use of new technology is to be commended where it offers a real benefit to the population but the number of shady marketing scammers who jump on the band wagon and offer 'jam today' for 'next to no cost' are deluded, ignorant and fraudulent. Sadly there are so few of our engineering peers in Parliamnet that powerful lobby groups periodically manage to bully the UK Govt into making legislation that suits their commercial agenda and is not properly peer reviewed before roll out. But that is another story! Good luck everybody.

I have been bombarded by adverts of this kind saying that we need "Never pay a landline phone bill again" and claiming that VoIP is a NEW Technology that the phone companies do not want us to know about! The very strong implication being that we need not pay (around £200 per annum) for Line Rental and can simply swap over to VoIP and save loads of money. As several Forum Members have already observed, we still have to pay for Line Rental if we want a decent low latency, ADSL (Typically 36Mbit/s Download and 10 Mbit/s Upload) cabled Broadband service for our Laptops, PCs, Tablest and Smartphones in our homes. The only current alternative is using your smartphone over a nominal 4G/LTE mobile air interface which means waiting say 10 times as long as ADSL Fibre Broadband to the Street Cabinet, to upload a simple 3 minute 250MB video to 'the cloud' for the purposes of submitting my Smartphone AV recording of the Bass part to a Virtual Choir invitation in May of this year during 'The Lockdown'. This was done by mistake when I had accidentally turned off my WiFi connection to the Router Modem in the Hallway!


Yes 5G is promising even faster access to the WWW than current 4G networks, but we all know that the reality will be poorer phone coverage geographically, significantly less speed than promised on paper and a requirement for many more antenna to support the shorter range that 5G brings. The appropriate use of new technology is to be commended where it offers a real benefit to the population but the number of shady marketing scammers who jump on the band wagon and offer 'jam today' for 'next to no cost' are deluded, ignorant and fraudulent. Sadly there are so few of our engineering peers in Parliamnet that powerful lobby groups periodically manage to bully the UK Govt into making legislation that suits their commercial agenda and is not properly peer reviewed before roll out. But that is another story! Good luck everybody.