More Digital Voice fiasco

[davidgillon]

I did some more digging into OFCOM's* role in Digital Voice after last night's power cut  - I was planning on doing this anyway, to understand how Digital Voice will impact my mother, given they're talking about phones no longer working for emergency calls even during a powercut and she has an emergency care setup** with the council, but the powercut concentrated my mind wonderfully. And I'm less than impressed.

I finally dug up OFCOM's consultation document on the project, but it took me a good half hour to find it from starting looking, and I'm hardly a novice at web-searches. You basically had to know exactly what it was called to be able to find it on their website, because the search function only works on titles, and I had to go through about three other documents to find out the name. And having found it, I found that, exactly as I had expected, there had been no responses to the consultation from groups representing elderly or disabled people, because they did nothing to involve them in it. IIRC there are 18 responses, of which a dozen are from industry, four or five are from individuals, and the last is from the statutory Communications Consumer Panel of industry experts, which tells OFCOM they need a 2 hour battery backup on everyone's phone to make sure they can dial 999 through the length of a typical powercut, and 8 hours for people at risk, and that they have to treat emergency care services exactly like the normal emergency services and make sure people can contact those as well, And OFCOM have completely ignored that and said 1 hour battery back up for people at risk will do, because everyone else has a mobiile, even though their own document says 2 million don't, and when we just had people without landline or mobile service for a fortnight after Storm Arwen.

Link to the OFCOM Consultation

And I also turned up a response from BT to the article in the Northern Echo that started me looking into all of this - Echo article with the response The response does have bits of the normal PR "Oh, its all a fuss about nothing", but when it goes on to say "we will discuss (vulnerable people's) options which can include delaying their upgrade for a year, when other solutions may become available" that basically admits they know their plans are inadequate and they're hoping the government will bail them out.

*Headdesk*

And in other powercut reactions I ordered myself a couple of LED camping lanterns from Amazon that turned up this afternoon. I think they're a bit flimsier than I'd like for actually taking camping, but they're brilliant (ha!) for sticking in a drawer for the next time the power goes out.
 

* The US equivalent would be the FCC.

** The setup my mother has is fairly typical, there's a bangle she wears on her wrist and pressing the button on that will alert their control room via a box plugged into the phone socket, and the control room will then try to contact her through a speaker and a microphone in the box sensitive enough to pick up someone shouting for help from another room - but obviously that depends on the box having power.