Today our Virgin landline started misbehaving - incoming calls would ring once and then drop out. I isolated the cause to be a fault in the line itself rather than our own equipment. As I was still able to make outgoing calls I phoned 151 and eventually spoke to someone. The operator said they would 'send me a new handset' but later said 'some new equipment' which we should connect to the hub (hardwired ethernet?) and it will provide an alternative phone line. This didn't sound like a normal telephone line fix, more of an upgrade, so I had interrogate the operator some more...
Virgin are apparently planning to switch out all the near-obsolete 50v exchange lines onto a fibre-based telephony system (which requires a hub to telephone line adaptor). When the old lines go faulty they do the switchover early instead of repairing the old line (and there's a bunch of them in our street). He kept asking if we depend on any critical telephony services like life support or health monitors. He also said that our existing phone equipment 'may not be compatible' with the new system, and we'll have no back-up exchange power. Oh joy.
So as I wait in silence for the new equipment to arrive it looks like we'll need to free-up a mains socket to power this thing, plus another mains socket for the EOM (if it really needs an ethernet port), and plug in our existing telephones (which may or may not work).
You would have thought a communications provider would be good at communicating things like this to the customer beforehand?
But hey, if it ain't fixed - don't break it.
I'd love to hear other peoples experience with these new telephone interface things.
