Telecom's NGN will make old phones obsolete

Reuters

NUMBER DISCONNECTED: The days of the self powered phone are numbered.

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Hundreds of thousands of conventional telephones that do not require mains power and are instead powered off the phone network will not work once Telecom switches to its Next-Generation Network, Telecom has confirmed.

Dial-up Internet access will also be withdrawn and analogue modems in personal computers may not work, Telecom says.

The switch-over from the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) to the NGN has been planned for several years and is scheduled to be finished by 2012, though there is growing speculation the completion date will be pushed back to 2015.

From then, customers will require a "residential gateway" device in their home that will need mains power.

Existing wiring and phone sockets will not have to be replaced and mains-powered phones such as cordless phones will still work, but conventional analogue home phones will not. Business phones that are powered through a PABX should not be affected.

Green Party IT spokesman Nandor Tancos says he is concerned about the impact on the environment. Doubts have also been raised about people's ability to make 111 calls during an extended black-out.

Telecom notes that batteries in cordless phones have a limited life span. Customers may decide to rely on mobiles to make calls during black-outs, it says.

Telecom group technology officer Greg Patchell says the downsides of the switch to the NGN cannot be avoided.

The PSTN equipment that sits in exchanges or roadside cabinets provides the power to phone lines now, so power will be lost when the PSTN is scrapped.

"The voltage is required because analogue voice services fundamentally depend upon voltage changes to work." Ethernet "combo cards" that can support NGN applications alongside traditional analogue voice services are available, but Mr Patchell says the economics of installing them in roadside cabinets is "pretty shabby".

"It is a viable option if you intend to keep an analogue switched platform permanently, and we do not. The problem we have got, which is somewhat unique compared to other countries, is that our PSTN does not get manufactured parts any more, so we have to get rid of the entire thing.

"What we are proposing is to deliver all voice calls over voice-over-IP, which implies a powered device in the home."

Telecom will rely on cannibalising spare parts from the PSTN as it replaces it with the NGN, to keep the phone network in working order till the change-over is complete. As a result of unbundling, other telcos would be free to install combo cards and build their own PSTN, but Mr Patchell accepts this is unlikely.

Though many telephone exchanges do have diesel generators that can provide power to the phone network and to conventional analogue phones in an emergency, many others have only battery back-up that would last only a matter of hours, so in many parts of the country conventional phones could not be used indefinitely following a major power outage anyway, he says.

Battery back-up in roadside cabinets will last for "up to eight hours". In the event of a power outage that followed the introduction of "fibre to the node", phone calls would not be possible once that back-up power was exhausted, even if conventional analogue phones were still supported using combo cards.

Mr Patchell says most customers now have cordless phones, with unpowered phones - many of which have been in use for decades - making up a quarter of the devices attached to its network.

The Economic Development Ministry is seeking public submissions on whether residential gateways themselves should be required to have battery back-up as part of the Kiwi Share.

Telecom said in a document released by the ministry as part of its discussion paper on the revamp of the "Kiwi Share" agreement that personal computers would need to connect to the residential gateway device in the home to connect to the Internet.

Dial-up modems will not be supported by the NGN, though Telecom could offer a DSL-based Internet service that had a similar speed to dial-up.

- © Fairfax NZ News