Tag Archives: BT

Moving Your Phone Service to the Internet

Once you’ve got yourself connected to our spiffy new fibre network, you’ll probably still have your landline phone number and the BT landline over which it’s delivered to your house. It doesn’t matter who you use to provide your phone service, it still comes in over that ancient BT copper wire, and of course you’re charged line rental and call charges for using it – most of us have been paying £25-30 a month for this.

The good news is that you don’t need to do this once you’re connected to the fibre: you can move your existing number into an online telephone service over our fibre connection, ditch your BT line altogether and thereafter only pay for the calls you make, with no line rental. Oh, and the sound quality will be much, much better.

The technology used is called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP for short.  In many cases, you can also continue to use your existing telephones, with the aid of a small adapter.

So this is how to set up VoIP over BCB’s fibre (or indeed, anyone else’s) network.

Continue reading Moving Your Phone Service to the Internet

BT Moving in Mysterious Ways

We set up BCB after years of trying to persuade BT to do something – anything – to improve local broadband. Where they’ve been consistent is their contention that our area is not a viable commercial proposition even for their half-baked FTTC service. They wouldn’t even engage with us to help develop our model through their community outreach programme, although they did tell The Telegraph that we’d turned them down. Not so. Continue reading BT Moving in Mysterious Ways

Universal Service Exemption

I was asked to comment last night on Radio 4’s PM programme about the commitment in the Queen’s Speech to 10Mb/s broadband for all in the UK by 2020. The BBC only had a very limited time available, but I did manage to get ‘fatuous’ and ‘insane’ into my piece, which gives you some idea of where I’m coming from. The on-air piece itself is available here on iPlayer (starting 17:37 in).

Continue reading Universal Service Exemption

Copper-Bottomed Con

Whilst we and other communities in the UK push ahead with bringing fibre to every property in our area, The UK and Local governments continue to give a good impression of being in thrall to the BT Group, an underachieving and disinterested private monopoly that still tries to pretend that copper-to-premises is a valid service model for the twenty-first century. Continue reading Copper-Bottomed Con