Kitz Forum
Broadband Related => Broadband Technology => Topic started by: gt94sss2 on November 14, 2020, 05:00:20 PM
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We’re making a small change to the way you use Digital Voice – your home phone service – to call local numbers.
What are we changing?
From 11 December 2020 we’re changing the way Digital Voice works, so you’ll need to dial the full national number, including the dialling code, whenever you call any local numbers.
Why are we doing this?
There’s already a huge demand for more phone numbers, something that’s only going to grow as we become ever more connected. By freeing up numbers now, we’re helping everyone get ready for the exciting new world of digital phone services.
What do you need to do?
• From 11 December 2020 dial the complete number, including the dialling code, every time you call someone, whether they’re next door or hundreds of miles away.
• Remember to check that all of the numbers you’ve saved in your home phone include the full dialling code.
What happens if you forget to dial the whole number?
You’ll hear a message asking you to dial the full national number.
This change helps the whole country get ready for the switch to digital phone lines. And as a Digital Voice customer, you’re right there at the start. We appreciate it.
Was surprised to receive this..
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Who sent that?
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BT
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Seem kinda ironic when my VoIP provider lets me choose a local dialling code number for free so people can use the local number without the area code .... strange
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I hope this doesn’t mean BT are doing away with the whole concept of local area codes under VoIP?
I find area codes extremely useful for at least two Further purposes, not just lazy dialling’.
1) I may be able commit a 6 digit number to memory for a short time. For example, I see an advert that interests me in the village newsletter I can memorise the number, put down the paper, then pick up the phone and dial the number. For longer numbers I’d need to refer back to the paper half way through dialling.
2) When I search to find a local tradesman, I generally favour one that lists a landline number with an area code that supports his claim to be ‘local’.
Interesting also that they seem to be referring to it all as a huge network switch to ‘digital’. Local lines excepted, hasn’t the UK PSTN been almost entirely digital for several decades, since rollout of System X from 70s and early 80s?
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I'm guessing that the concept of the local dialing code was more to do with telephone exchanges, that they were easier to manage by assigning an area code to certain exchanges. Whereas, as far as I know digital voice is connected to FTTP? and from what I've seen FTTP doesn't rely on exchanges in the same way.
For dialing purposes I can remember my own local number. That wouldnt be an issue. But as SLM mentioned we're not going to be able to tell if someone else is local if they are assigned a random number, which is the implication of this change. That at some point if OR are allocating numbers in the future it wouldn't necessarily have the same local area code as me, even though we're in the same area. That could start to become confusing.
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Was surprised to receive this..
I presume that snippet was from BT Residential? because BT Business already require you to dial the full STD code for local numbers as well, always been that way since I took out their DV service back in Oct 2019. So they're just aligning both Residential and Business Digital Voices, I guess the next step is for BTR to also roll out a smartphone VOIP app like BTB have (Cloud Voice Express). This allows you to do stuff like make/receive VOIP calls from your smartphone, access voicemail, block numbers etc and works very well.
Also most - if not all - other VOIP providers have always required you to dial the full STD codes no matter where you're calling. So not a big deal IMHO.
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I've worked for the same haulage/removals company for almost 30 years, and I'm certain that their signwriting on the removals trucks have advertised three different office numbers, across three different area codes since I started there. They've only ever had the one office though, so its nothing new for an area code not to reflect the actual location of where that number is based. However that's not the norm, but probably more common than we realise.
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I've worked for the same haulage/removals company for almost 30 years, and I'm certain that their signwriting on the removals trucks have advertised three different office numbers, across three different area codes since I started there. They've only ever had the one office though, so its nothing new for an area code not to reflect the actual location of where that number is based. However that's not the norm, but probably more common than we realise.
Landline Area code is not the only parameter I look at when assessing a tradesperson, it may sometimes be outdated and wrong. It may even be deliberately spoofed. But for small independent firms, majority of the time it will be accurate, hence making it a useful tool, to be used alongside other factors.
When you search for trades and services these days, with a town name in the search, a lot of websites seem to recover the search term and dynamically construct a web page claiming to be local to the town you searched for. It would be quite hard for them to also generate a functional landline number with area code corresponding to that town, so I often use area code as a quick way of filtering out such irritants.
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Yes I've often noticed the town name spoofed into searches, most annoying.
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Also most - if not all - other VOIP providers have always required you to dial the full STD codes no matter where you're calling. So not a big deal IMHO.
I could very well be a big deal for some elderly people though once they are forced off their copper lines.
I wonder how many people still actually dial their phone vs having everything saved in an address book?
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I could very well be a big deal for some elderly people though once they are forced off their copper lines.
I wonder how many people still actually dial their phone vs having everything saved in an address book?
Those who find it too difficult to dial the full number will have frequently dialled numbers saved as contacts in the address book - done by a family member or friend if necessary. Also, by the time everyone is forced off copper and onto VOIP, smartphone voip apps such as BT's Cloud Voice Express will be the norm and you probably won't even need to press any buttons; simply ask Siri to dial the number for you :)
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Those who find it too difficult to dial the full number will have frequently dialled numbers saved as contacts in the address book - done by a family member or friend if necessary. Also, by the time everyone is forced off copper and onto VOIP, smartphone voip apps such as BT's Cloud Voice Express will be the norm and you probably won't even need to press any buttons; simply ask Siri to dial the number for you :)
I think that's a huge assumption. There are plenty of people who don't have family members to help so rely on things as they are.
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Just a note, please, can we keep it polite and mutually respectful?
Speaking of people who ‘find it too difficult to dial the full number’ might well be offensive to those who do not find it the least bit difficult, but who feel there are other advantages, beyond overcoming ‘excessive difficulty’. :)
Examples have already been posted, earlier in thread. Such as the fact most people can mentally ‘copy & paste’ a six digit number from a newspaper advert to a phone dial or keypad. But few can do the same with a full national number. Using the full number requires harping back to the paper advert for second set of digits, it is not ‘difficult’, it’s just rather irritating and a step backwards in telephony technology.
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I haven't heard any great fuss from the places where this has been implemented several years ago due to shortage of available numbers.
https://www.area-codes.org.uk/more/areas-without-local-dialling.php
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I haven't heard any great fuss from the places where this has been implemented several years ago due to shortage of available numbers.
https://www.area-codes.org.uk/more/areas-without-local-dialling.php
Fascinating that people are happy with that.
I wonder if the average age of population in these areas might be too young to remember the even better system (my opinion), based on initial characters of exchange locations?
I was brought up in an area of Glasgow served by the Ibrox exchange. Calling within the city there was no need to remember a numeric area code, you just had to remember ‘Ibrox’ and dial the first 3 letters using the alpha holes on the dial, ‘I’,’B’,’R’, followed by an easily remembered 4 digit number of the person you wanted.
Wonderful system, happy days. So much for progress, says I if nobody else. :(
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I presume that snippet was from BT Residential? because BT Business already require you to dial the full STD code for local numbers as well, always been that way since I took out their DV service back in Oct 2019. So they're just aligning both Residential and Business Digital Voices, I guess the next step is for BTR to also roll out a smartphone VOIP app like BTB have (Cloud Voice Express). This allows you to do stuff like make/receive VOIP calls from your smartphone, access voicemail, block numbers etc and works very well.
Yes, the email was from BT Residential with whom the line has a FTTC connection. I can't see the change creating any new numbers for years in London (where the line is) for years though given we still have the rest of the 020 code to use.
I would love a smartphone VOIP app though BT withdrew their Smart Talk app at the end of 2018 citing low usage..
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I do dimly remember alpha holes on a dial, now I come to think of it.
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1) I may be able commit a 6 digit number to memory for a short time. For example, I see an advert that interests me in the village newsletter I can memorise the number, put down the paper, then pick up the phone and dial the number. For longer numbers I’d need to refer back to the paper half way through dialling.
2) When I search to find a local tradesman, I generally favour one that lists a landline number with an area code that supports his claim to be ‘local’.
"Local" numbers will still begin with the same first 5 digits as your own number, so you can still just memorise the last six digits and when dialling, dial your own STD code and then the remembered number. You'll also still be able to recognise numbers with the same area code as yours.
What the change means is that they will be able to allocate numbers where the first digit after the area code is a zero or one.
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"Local" numbers will still begin with the same first 5 digits as your own number, so you can still just memorise the last six digits and when dialling, dial your own STD code and then the remembered number. You'll also still be able to recognise numbers with the same area code as yours.
What the change means is that they will be able to allocate numbers where the first digit after the area code is a zero or one.
Your quote from my earlier post was incomplete, skipping the first two sentences, which set context for the remainder...
I hope this doesn’t mean BT are doing away with the whole concept of local area codes under VoIP?
I find area codes extremely useful for at least two Further purposes, not just lazy dialling’.
1) I may be able commit a 6 digit number to memory for a short time. For example, I see an advert that interests me in the village newsletter I can memorise the number, put down the paper, then pick up the phone and dial the number. For longer numbers I’d need to refer back to the paper half way through dialling.
2) When I search to find a local tradesman, I generally favour one that lists a landline number with an area code that supports his claim to be ‘local’.
Interesting also that they seem to be referring to it all as a huge network switch to ‘digital’. Local lines excepted, hasn’t the UK PSTN been almost entirely digital for several decades, since rollout of System X from 70s and early 80s?
If, as you suggest, it is the case that they are not doing away with the whole concept of area codes then indeed, these problems do not arise.
But do area codes serve any purpose in the VoIP world? If not, why would BT continue to maintain and assign them?
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But do area codes serve any purpose in the VoIP world? If not, why would BT continue to maintain and assign them?
Keeping area codes is the easiest thing to do
There's nothing to maintain.
Assigning them is no work, they are assigned automatically based on area, obviously.
What's the alternative?
Having newly issued numbers be totally random or assign any old area code to anyone?
I can't think of a viable, working alternative to area codes that wouldn't cause considerable confusion for no gain.
Everyone with a current landline would have their number starting with an identical area code to everyone else around them.
Anyone who was issued a new number would be on a different numbering system.
Isn't it just easier to keep area codes assigned as they are?
It's easy enough to enter the area code when dialing a local number. I do it on my mobile phone most days.
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Seems to me that by maintaining area codes for new subscribers, they perpetuate the recurring problems whereby area codes fill up and need to be enlarged, so everybody in town has to accept an extra digit or two in their existing numbers. I can see that becoming even more frequent with VoIP, as new VoIP numbers cost pretty much nothing.
It’s happened a few times over the years and from BT’s perspective, would be a problem well worth solving for good, by simply disassociating geographic identities from numbers.
New numbers assigned at random is, after all, what we’ve always accepted for mobiles...
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Its been a very long time since I made a call from a landline so already used to using area codes for local numbers.
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To be fair, most of the time when its done here (usually my mum) its probably none-regional codes anyway for government/council/supermarkets/etc (where you are left on hold for ages so she worries about running out of credit on her phone) so we would key in the full number too.
But I think its short sighted to not consider there will still be people who struggle to adjust to this sort of change. eg I know someone who I can't even get to use Netflix when I provide the box, Internet and account, because its too complicated.
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I'll be sad to see local dialling disappear, but then I was sad when local exchange codes (ie between local adjacent exchanges) were binned back in the '90s.
:)
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I was sad to see Strowger disappear - no romance in a silicon chip. :(
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I was sad to see Strowger disappear - no romance in a silicon chip. :(
So true - a running Strowger exchanger was a beautiful sight to behold.
:)
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So true - a running Strowger exchanger was a beautiful sight to behold.
Indeed, many years ago used to sneak into the local PBX room of the company where I served my apprenticeship and worked, was facinated by the whizzing uniselector banks.
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The sight, the sound, the smell - almost like a living thing.
I've never been a steam locomotive buff, but I suppose the attraction is similar.
I loved working in UAXs and TXE2s. In the years following retirement I used to have dreams about the former, but never the latter.
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Yes indeed, spent many happy hours adding 'A' units to UAXs, SAXs were never quite the same somehow although Strowger. At least with Crossbar exchanges there were still lots of relays and electro-mechanical switches unlike TXE2s.
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Never got acquainted with Crossbar. We only had one SAX on our patch, and as you say, not quite the same.
In the middle of a row of not very rural-looking houses, and with less than average line count. Pale blue vinyl tiles, cavernous, and due to the location, an ice box in winter.
Always glad to finish a job and shut the door on the soulless place!
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The heat and noise of the Strowger equipment though ..... compared to the relative noise-free TXE2/4 equipment :-\
Only had one Crossbar Exchange on my patch and if memory serves the TO's used to say they were harder to fault-find on than the other types in use ??
I certainly remember this one time, the Strowger TOA in my local Exchange opening up a couple of mahooooosive detached contact, electro-mechanical diagrams, to locate an issue a customer was having.
They were like my living room carpet when put next to each other and to say I was in awe watching the bloke, (who as an aside, was my old man's drinking buddy in our local boozer) work his way through it and locate the problem, is an under-statement !!
Still .... he could have been talking to me about the nuances of creating a proper 'Full English' breakfast for all I know ... the bl00dy noise in there !!!!!! ::) ;D
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Makes you feel young, Black Sheep?
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Makes you feel young, Black Sheep?
Ha ha .... when I think back (35+yrs), as a newly qualified electrician who had just landed his dream job at BT and being introduced to this bespoke electro-mechanical equipment that performed the magical task of connecting people around the world ... it was a genuine eye-opener.
I never worked on the actual equipment, bar helping out with 'bank-cleaning' once (a device that cleaned both sides of the Strowger selector contacts at the same time), as my role at the time was on power construction, then power maintenance.
Can't give a definitive time-line but I'd say within 7/8yrs of being employed by BT, the massive wet, open-cell back-up battery sets had been replaced with basically car batteries and the large, clunky rectifiers (231, 233's) were reduced to slide in units
weighing about 6/7kg.
I'd say the only functional device that is left from that era, is the back-up generator (engine) sets ??
Glad to have been witness to the old tech and part of the whole project upgrading to the new tech. As we can see, the tech has moved on massively from those days which is both scary and intriguing to think that just 30-odd years ago we still had party-lines and dial-phones ???
Obviously, as I'm typing I'm A) more than aware the tech hasn't quite got to you yet Weaver, but this is purely a cost-decision ... and B) I seem to have deviated from the OP, apologies.
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As a N.I. resident bordering county Donegal, I had a work colleague back in the 1970/80's who lived in Donegal where they still had non-dial, magneto phones with 3 digit numbers and a local exchange operator.
He gave an example demonstrating where that system could actually produce additional benefits.
It was not unusal to receive a call from the operator in the morning advising that there had been a call late the previous evening, the said operator insisting on knowing the nature of the call and if deemed to be unimportant the subscriber would not be disturbed until a reasonable hour the following morning.
Donegal has moved on now, virtually 100% FTTC (with vectoring) coverage and the said operator is probably long since deceased.
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But, of course, it also had its disadvantages, hence prompting Almon B Strowger inventing his automatic system.
As an aside, there were still quite a few manual exchanges extant when I first ventured forth with the GPO. :oldman: :oldman: :oldman:
With one exchange in particular, I was involved in providing a Strowger replacement for the manual switchboard above the post office, I then installed a Crossbar to replace the Strowger and moved the subscribers to that and later saw it move to a digital exchange. 4 different technologies at one location in my working lifetime.
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But, of course, it also had its disadvantages, hence prompting Almon B Strowger inventing his automatic system.
As an aside, there were still quite a few manual exchanges extant when I first ventured forth with the GPO. :oldman: :oldman: :oldman:
One of our manuals went auto the previous year, and there were still two on the patch when I joined in '65.
I recall that many of the older subscribers questioned whether this dialling malarkey was really "progress".
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I recall that many of the older subscribers questioned whether this dialling malarkey was really "progress".
Were they necessarily wrong?
I’m assuming the earlier option was “Operator! Operator! Get me this number...”.
Lots of people seem to think the way forwards is to ask Siri to call a number, and Siri is still not all that good at it. :)
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Were they necessarily wrong?
I’m assuming the earlier option was “Operator! Operator! Get me this number...”.
Precisely that.
Suddenly the personal contact they'd grown up with was gone. If they encountered a wrong number, excessive noise, or a dropped call etc, they couldn't just flash the switchhooks to get the operator back on line. They still had to call the operator for trunk calls of course, but it would be an unfamiliar voice from the switchroom in the GSC.
So, I understood their annoyance.
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I think that Siri is going to be absolutely wonderful for old folks, especially when it improves in its accuracy and its range of abilities. When I am in bad pain or confused or paralysed or simply can’t work out how to do something then I just get Siri to do it for me. You can type commands and questions to Siri too, instead of speaking them. Might depend on settings, can’t recall. For example then I just ask Siri to send an emergency iMessage to Janet and I can do that even if I can’t move. When I want to cancel an alarm, I can never work out how to do it, so I just tell Siri.
It really is finally Startrek or ‘2001’ become a reality, albeit the primitive early beginnings of it, talking to the computer. You never need to know how to use a cryptic UI or need to use a keyboard to type commands (see Startrek IV comedy scene). In the 1960s though, they couldn’t think beyond the idea of a single massive mainframe, like in 2001; couldn’t imagine the desktop PC, or laptop or even less the iPad or iPhone or Raspberry Pi, Apple Watch and other tiny computers, and they hadn’t thought up the internet or wireless and wireful LANs.
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I think that Siri is going to be absolutely wonderful for old folks, especially when it improves in its accuracy and its range of abilities. When I am in bad pain or confused or paralysed or simply can’t work out how to do something then I just get Siri to do it for me. You can type commands and questions to Siri too, instead of speaking them. Might depend on settings, can’t recall. For example then I just ask Siri to send an emergency iMessage to Janet and I can do that even if I can’t move. When I want to cancel an alarm, I can never work out how to do it, so I just tell Siri.
It really is finally Startrek or ‘2001’ become a reality, albeit the primitive early beginnings of it, talking to the computer. You never need to know how to use a cryptic UI or need to use a keyboard to type commands (see Startrek IV comedy scene). In the 1960s though, they couldn’t think beyond the idea of a single massive mainframe, like in 2001; couldn’t imagine the desktop PC, or laptop or even less the iPad or iPhone or Raspberry Pi, Apple Watch and other tiny computers, and they hadn’t thought up the internet or wireless and wireful LANs.
Sorry but I wouldn't trust these voice recognition and command systems as far as I can throw them. Last week was a classic - told the Sat Nav in my Mercedes to cancel route guidance, and the response I got was "Turning off rear interior lights" (which were not on in the first place).
And I'm a 73 year old old folk.
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Hence my remark about ‘when it improves’. And god help those of us whose accent is not RP and therefore outside the training set that Apple et al trained their software on. I have seen video on youtube about for example lowland scots trying to get a voice recognition system to do the right thing.
I wonder if your Mercedes’ system is rubbish because of background noise. Siri doesn’t like it at all, everything has to be quiet, so no oriental tomcat yowling for smoked salmon (Somhairle) while Janet is making sandwiches and I’m trying to talk to Siri.
However as I said, Siri is good at speech recognition but just damn stupid, definitely still in the remedial class. It doesn’t have a proper parser for English and I suspect it relies on just a load of heuristics and hand-crafted rules, but that’s pure guesswork based solely on its failings when tested with non-trivial sentences. Give it another ten years and it might be something impressive.
If they had based it on something powerful like RRG (Role and Reference Grammar) then they might have a chance of really understanding sentences. However RRG only does syntax, specifically the syntax-semantics interface, and so needs a lexicon, phonology, morphology and pragmatics components from elsewhere and also more semantic analysis obtained from some other software shop. And a truly massive computer to run all that lot on, which is why Siri needs an internet connection, because she doesn’t have remotely enough CPU power available locally.
Forty years ago, I remember having a little chat with ELIZA on a DEC-10 mainframe. I said to her "If you don’t tell me what sex you are, I am long to kill myself" Answer: "We were talking about you, not me", Me: "I am going to my doom post haste", ELIZA: "Tell me more about your doom post haste."
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Voice recognition, I remember a demo where the system simply didn't understand what our sales engineer was saying. Similar to ..
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU[/youtube]
[Moderator edited to fix the YouTube link.]
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Voice recognition, I remember a demo where the system simply didn't understand what our sales engineer was saying. Similar to ..
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU
:D
But you can’t necessarily blame the software.
I have the remnants of a Scots accent myself and such conversations are not at all unusual with actual human beings in some parts, who seem incapable of adapting their ears to any accent other than their own. :-[
That’s meant as a joke, please don’t take it as a grump. :)
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But you can’t necessarily blame the software.
I can and do, if people deploy voice recognition technology they should make sure it can recognise the way people actually speak, not just how they think people should speak. Another real example I have is my bank where it wants me "in just a few words, tell me the reason for your call", but can't understand any sort of actual word or sentence. You just get an increasingly impatient robot "(sigh), once again, tell me the reason for your call." Kind of reminds me of trying to log a fault with BT when the noise on the line prevented them recognising DTMF.
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Harping back to my own accent, Siri probably does a better job than most humans down South.
Per call centre speech recognition, I find most will recognise things spelled out in Internationally recognised phonetic alphabet “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta...”. This works well for postcodes, for example, as well as car registrations, etc.
But when I drop into phonetics with most humans, it often just makes things worse. “Hotel, what?”.