Father re-signed Vodafone HFC contract and then was told he will lose existing copper phone line

Forums › One New Zealand (including Vodafone, WxC, Farmside) › Father re-signed Vodafone HFC contract and then was told he will lose existing copper phone line - any way to avoid this?

tieke

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#262073 3-Jan-2020 20:22

Got a call from my father - when he spotted that his Vodafone bill had had its standard contract renewal increase he called them up and renewed his broadband/sky tv/phoneline package (provided over HFC) for another year.

Today he got a notification that he had requested a VOIP line install so should be aware of issues with existing monitoring packages etc. This caused a bit of annoyance as he didn't think he had "requested" a VOIP phone, and would cause issues for his existing monitored alarm system. He called back and told them he didn't want his POTs line changed, and that if they couldn't do so he wasn't going to sign another year's contract.

Apparently after a long discussion he was told that he probably couldn't stick with a copper phone line, but that they would call him back in ten minutes if it was possible. No call came, so he's considering going with another provider.

Although he is provisioned over HFC he does have fibre to the front of his house, so changing to another provider shouldn't be too difficult, but I thought I should check if anyone knew if there was a way to keep his existing copper line to avoid the faff of a changeover?

sbiddle

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#2384756 3-Jan-2020 20:27

Vodafone are migrating all customers to VoIP and ultimately shutting down their Nortel switch. You *may* be able to stay if you find the right person to do it for you but will have to move eventually.

I'm not sure what relevance fibre has - if you move to fibre you'll be moved to VoIP, and even if you moved to a RSP and kept a Chorus / Spark PSTN line the migration of these all to VoIP and NEAX shutdown of the whole POTS network starts accelerating within the next few months with full shutdown in the years ahead.

Regardless of who you go with you will need to upgrade your alarm. Monitoring of alarms over POTS won't really be a thing within the next 2 years or so as a result of the POTS shutdown.

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NickR1

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#2384762 3-Jan-2020 20:54

Hi there,

The resign will involve migrating to a VOIP only account platform which is meant to have been advised during the sales call. If you've received any emails with a new account number it means the ball is rolling - please PM me any account details so I can fully halt the process while you and your father discuss your options.

Yabanize

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#2384787 3-Jan-2020 21:06

Yep, when we recently upgraded from Cable 100/10 / copper landline / TBox to HFC Max / VoIP landline / Vodafone TV we got a new customer number on the Vodafone A system as opposed the the Vodafone C / CustomerZone / Ex-TCL system we were on.

In fact I don't think they have canceled the old service and are still billing us for it. Will have to chase them up on that.

As Sbiddle said, everything is going VoIP no matter who you order from.

hio77

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#2384818 3-Jan-2020 22:35

Yabanize:
As Sbiddle said, everything is going VoIP no matter who you order from.

Not all providers.

Many are making the jump to cut the cost they pay wholesale though. There are pros and cons to the both options.

Realistically 99% of alarms work fine on VoIP. But I haven't come across any telco that would be crazy enough to take that risk.

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wired

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#2384881 4-Jan-2020 07:02

If your father’s place is within a Specified Fibre Area as defined by the Commerce Commission https://comcom.govt.nz/regulated-industries/telecommunications/regulated-services/consumer-protections-for-copper-withdrawal/map-of-specified-fibre-areasthen that gives Chorus the ability to decommission the copper line which will affect all the Service Providers. The industry is still working through the practicality of doing this and Chorus must work within the requirements of the Copper Withdrawal code which means that it probably won’t start until late this year.

As others have already said, the demise of the existing copper POTS is going to happen.

I put in a analogue telephone adapter into my last house just to provide a POTS to my monitored burglar alarm and had zero issues with it unlike the old copper wiring which often had an issue. The alarm company didn’t know any difference.

[edit]

Updated the link to the map rather than the discussion documents.

tieke

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#2384940 4-Jan-2020 12:07

Thanks everyone - I suspected that would be the case, but thought I'd check anyway.

Is there a POTs adapter I should recommend for him to get or will he probably be able to use the standard VOIP setup for his alarm monitoring?

Goosey

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#2384941 4-Jan-2020 12:12

tieke:

Thanks everyone - I suspected that would be the case, but thought I'd check anyway.

Is there a POTs adapter I should recommend for him to get or will he probably be able to use the standard VOIP setup for his alarm monitoring?

These are called ATA's. Some threads on here if you do a search :-)

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#2384943 4-Jan-2020 12:13

My parents are on the Vodafone VoIP over a fibre connection and don't notice any difference between POTS and VoIP line

sbiddle

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#2385001 4-Jan-2020 14:37

tieke:

Thanks everyone - I suspected that would be the case, but thought I'd check anyway.

Is there a POTs adapter I should recommend for him to get or will he probably be able to use the standard VOIP setup for his alarm monitoring?

You're not after a POTS adapter. You need to contact your alarm people who will switch you to either IP or 3G based monitoring.

For those who say "but my alarm works over VoIP" my simple response is no it doesn't.

Without reinventing the wheel because there are so many discussions on here about the issue, I've give a brief rundown. There are a number of different alarm standards out there but ContactID is the most common, and IRFast is probably next. ContactID sendds DTMF tones at 20ms whereas IRFast is FSK based like a dialup modem.

Depending on your VoIP provider DTMF is handed two ways in the VoIP world - inband or using OOB RFC2833 or newer RFC4733. Using inband it's sent inband as part of the RTF stream, whereas OOB the DTMF is decoded by the ATA and sent as part of the SIP signalling and then converted back to DTMF tones at the other end of the call. Inband can only work with G.711 alaw or ulaw as the codec, whereas OOB can work with compressed codecs. IRFast is FSK based so sounds like a modem on the end of the connection.

Many ATA's struggle with 20ms DTMF, and likewise if you're using inband the slightest bit of jitter or packet loss will cause corruption. IRFast can and does suffer from similar problems trying to run a low speed data connection over VoIP.

So in a nutshell can an alarm work over VOIP? Yes it can. It can work very well but at best it's a 99% solution and there is zero guarantee that it will work 100% of the time. This simply is not good enough for something so critical which is why the alarm should be migrated to IP based monitoring either via an IP module or 3G.

The alarm industry has been in denial about the impending POTS shutdown for the last decade because they've been able to rely on dirt cheap legacy hardware rather than actually moving forward.

Yabanize

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#2385100 4-Jan-2020 17:30

hio77:
Yabanize:

As Sbiddle said, everything is going VoIP no matter who you order from.

Not all providers.

Many are making the jump to cut the cost they pay wholesale though. There are pros and cons to the both options.

Realistically 99% of alarms work fine on VoIP. But I haven't come across any telco that would be crazy enough to take that risk.

I mean sure you may be able to order copper for the short term

but with NAEX and Ex-TelstraClear Nortel's being shutting down it's going to be VoIP either from the router, ONT or Chorus ISAM-V card?