OT Fibre connection

Yes, although such a move has to managed carefully (by involving the PN staff who  contribute to that site to manually tweak things) to ensure you are not clobbered with early termination fees when the FTTC account ceases.

That manoeuvre would seem to be a solution, though a downside to that (if you have an overhead drop wire) is Openreach won't (because they obviously can't) rip down the copper drop-wire as part of the FTTP install. Depending how OCD you are about the asthetics of your house, that may or may not be an issue. As previously noted, the chances of being given a hybrid drop-wire are diminishing.

Are they allowed to give preferential treatment to "sister" providers?

Unclear but don't look a gift horse in the mouth. (vets bills not withstanding)

When I was with EE they couldn't offer what I wanted but their customer service reps were quite happy to put me through to BT sales internally!

The tend to be half way up the poles round here. Here is the one in my garden:

IME there a a world of difference between talktalk retail, and their business platform. I would not use the former, but I have positive experience with some customers who use the latter (although via a 3rd party reseller).

And the services at VOIP providers are better too - sends me messages by email rather than pestering me to ring the voicemail number at 10p a time.

(I don't seem to be able to shut up the O2 daily 'new voicemail!' message even if I know the voicemail I received 3 weeks ago was garbage and I don't need to listen to it)

Theo

I don't think it's a simple as the end user device. It also depends on what  bandwidth the network has selected for that call.

Some of the best quality mobile calls I've had have been in France, (me roaming on Orange with my UK EE phone, calling French mobiles)

To use a term from the 80s, 'Music Quality'

Since long haul phone calls are via optical fibres and digitally encoded it doesn't seem unreasonable to extend that to the premises.

'Digital=crap' is only so in cases of restricted bandwidth. There is no need for restriction on even a low speed broadband connection.

Yes...

Quite. DECT (or rather decent DECT phones) have perfectly adequate audio quality for voice transmission. Unlike the nasties you often get with mobile phones.

Can you connect your previous phone wiring to that POTS socket? Assuming all the phones in the house are DECT, so don't need volts of any sort off the line?

The way I was upgraded was two stage. I only really wanted the first stage which got me a fast full fibre connection but once that was installed my prize quality copper line pair became up for grabs.

Digital voice took a couple of months to foist itself upon me.

When they took it offline it still had voltage & dialtone but any attempt to dial out gave a number not recognised error. I disconnected the house wiring from the old master socket and connected the routers POTS port to a splitter one leg going to my desk phone and the other to the house wiring which used to feed it with a signal. All worked fine.

You just need to remember to disconnect the old copper incoming line which otherwise might damage or at least fight with the local POTS port.

Indeed there are many factors, but iPhones on the far end certainly seem to be a quality limiting factor. Quite often with muffled and laggy audio.

I have noticed some Android to android calls in the uk can be surprisingly high quality. Way above the traditional ~3kHz telephony channel bandwidth.

:-)

Yes.

There's quite good background to doing so here

:)

I recall the Openreach man asking where we'd like the boxes.

"In the understairs cupboard" I said.

He opened his mouth. I then added

"Where there's a double socket waiting for them"

I got that bit right when we had the house rewired. The stairs are less than 3 metres from the place the 'phone used to enter the house.

Andy

Around here there are green things about as fat as the pole, and at a convenient working height. One end is tapered, and that's where the cables go in. I've no idea whats in them, but I'll guess its similar.

Andy

I took BT for the upgrade purely because Openreach are part of BT, and it meant they couldn't easily point fingers at each other when it went wrong.

Which it did...

That said once the initial bugs were fixed it's been fault free

(cue dead line tone....)

Andy

I came across one of the large green things with its lid missing and took some photographs. There were about 40 hinged fibre splice trays and there appeared to be a passive splitter tucked behind the trays.

John

I recall CityFibre laying the fibre and cabinets in the road.

I signed up with Vodafone who sent out Kelly Communications.

In the small print itr said everything had to be at ground level and their engineers were not permitted to work off ladders or go into lofts.

I didn't want boxes on display on the ground floor so all my networking and tv/radio hendend is in the loft.

the previous virginmedia and BT services I had extended from the external wall box by the front door to the loft when I refurbished the house.

The Cityfibre used exactly the same ducting as BT and so another wallbox appeared next to the BT one. I have a garage next to the front door so got the ONT and router put into the garage by Kelly Communications after telling them there was already a doubel socket and a UPS installed.

I then blagged a 10 m long optical fibre patch cable so that I could run this from the wall box up to the loft. I then could move the ONT and router into the loft. :-)

Ours are decidedly more crude and smaller than that approx 8cm diameter and 3x as long rounded at each end black plastic with the blind unused optical couplers visible as knobbles on the surface.

If I can get close enough to one I will post an image. There are between

There are also figure of 8 double spools strain relievers on the poles at various random heights. Position sometimes chosen to avoid electrocuting the OR engineers on shared poles with bare wire mains on.