Phone scam WARNING

[Deejay]

Mornin' all

Thanks for the warning Blister.

From memory (forty years ago, how scary is that ) this is how it used to work in the large cities before digital exchanges came along. I doubt if the existing practices were changed.

You receive an incoming call. You clear down (replace the handset) but the caller does not. You can't get dial tone. After a delay of three to six minutes, the call was forcibly released and you would be able to get dial tone. Until the call was released, I think the caller was still charged.



Any BT switch people out there? Come to think of it, any BT switch people LEFT out there.

Cheers

 

[jlawrence]

The other thing to remember is that there are two sides to BT - ok they're actually 'supposed' to be two completely 100% different businesses. BT wholesale deals with the actual network side of things and BT retail is the one which sells to job public and 'normal' businesses.

As it happens BT wholesale have actually removed massive amounts of the copper from the network. Certainly inter-exchange is all fibre now and some of the exachange -> street cabinet is also fibre. I don't know what the completion date for fttc (fiber to the cabinet) is likely to be.
So the only copper would be from the street cabinet to premises.
That's about as good as it's going to get unless you'll be living in a brand new build area in which case you 'may' get fibre to the home.

I'm not defending BT, much of how things work in this country is antiquated but we're often stuck with it as the cost of changing is ridiculously high.

 

[devonwoody]

JL, I dont want to help BT anymore

But their land value of exchanges must be a terrific asset that they might no longer need so copper might be only a side line.
Incidentally my young grandchildren, bless their cotton socks, have broadband on their lappies, when they visit here, they plug in a dongle and go mobile.

 

[Deejay]

John

But their land value of exchanges must be a terrific asset

I think most of the local exchanges have been sold and leased back.

Cheers

Dave

 

[devonwoody]

Oh, well, killed off their seed corn did they. However leases are worth something.

Mind you 90% redundancy would most probably be the result of going mobile.

 

[frugal]

Like the BBC, the only bit if it to ever make any money was transmision as they owned all of the land that the broadcast towers were on. So of course they sold it off.

 

[TrimTheKing]

Oh, well, killed off their seed corn did they. However leases are worth something.

Mind you 90% redundancy would most probably be the result of going mobile.

DW, you make some valid points (others are just plain belligerant) but what about, as someone has already said, you live in a sh!tty mobile area, like me?

I have a wireless 3G dongle, which is great, if I am stood with the laptop on the window cill in my bedroom, on a clear wind and rain free day.

Very convenient, not!

 

[Deejay]

Apologies to Blister for going even further off topic

Frugal, you said

they owned all of the land that the broadcast towers were on. So of course they sold it off.

When you are £30billion in debt, something has to go. They sold 02 and Yell, amongst other stuff. At the time, all the telecom's companies were borrowing to invest and provide bandwidth for the boom in traffic which didn't happen. Remember a firm called Marconi?

It's not easy to make a reasonable profit from telephone services alone. Think about the capital investment involved. All the extras like broadband and on demand TV are what makes it viable, which is why we are all bombarded with adverts to persuade us to buy them.

When BT got its licence it was not allowed (I think for seven years) offer stuff like cable TV. Probably lucky there . seeing what happened to the original suppliers.

DW
Oh, well, killed off their seed corn did they. However leases are worth something

See above. I doubt that the site leases are the same as pub's and when 02 went to Telefonica the masts would probably been part of the deal. As far as turning the whole UK into a mobile network goes, Where is all the radio bandwidth coming from and who will provide service in rural areas? None of the mobile companies has 100% coverage because the cost of provision would never give a return. We would probably end up with the set up Mercury had with their coin boxes. City centres, railway stations and airports were covered with them, but you never saw one on a country crossroads, did you?


Cheers

Dave, who no longer needs a Valium tablet

 

[devonwoody]

If I was GM at BT it would be different. :wink:

How come they can get hold of a nuclear submarine when they want one, so reception can be good.

 

[jlawrence]

The BT wholesale (infrastructure) side of things should never have been privatised. It should have remained in public ownership.
The cost of putting fiber in the ground is stunningly high - so high that there is barely a business case for actually doing it - really only a government has the funds needed to put a national infrastructure of that kind in place.
BT is one of very few of the original 'network' infrastructure companies that haven't gone into administration (or whatever our equivalent of chapter 11 is), the vast majority of the infrastructure companies had to write off so much debt it was unreal - only now are they starting to turn profit and even then only just.
Everyone wants ultra-fast broadband, voip, vod, HDTV etc etc etc but no one wants to pay what it would actually cost to provide that level of bandwidth.
Mobile is the answer, ROFLMAO. Can you imagine the cost of streaming a film in HD over a 3G network - oh, wait they could spend a small fortune upgrading the whole net to 4G. And when they start that the government could almost bankrupt the mobile companies by auctioning off the spectrum they need in order to deploy the service in the first place.
Much as I like to bash BT as much as the next person, the wholesale side of things is actually pretty good at what they do - I hate BT retail though..

 

[Alf]

You all appear to be on another planet - BT can't even provide an adequate voice line round here. Getting rid of copper line? Hah! Most of it's still strung between ill-maintained poles. A friend of ours has had a battle with BT for over a year to get a reliable phone line (voice only) - her neighbour gave up, cut the line himself (risking a £1000 fine) and then demanded that they repair it because his little girls were without internet access. They brought out all the gear to repair his and left hers. Superb. Don't even get me started on the laughable idea of using mobiles instead. And what comes ashore just down the road? Why I do believe it's rather a lot of transatlantic cables. Salt, wound, into, rub - rearrange to form a likely sentence to describe this.

And breathe...

Sorry, but here in the third world we can get quite emotional about BT. You might have noticed. :lol: Anyway thanks for the tip-off on the scam; have alerted the aged parents as being most likely to be had. All they need to do now is remember. :wink:

Cheers, Alf