Whilst we’re not in an area that is listed as changing over to fibre anytime soon, we as a theatre have already had to move some services. Our Redcare burglar alarm service was ended so had to move to IP/Mobile. Our phone system was provided via ISDN which we were warned was by BT/Openreach would be switch off “within the next 2 years” about 4 years ago, but still hasn’t! So we switched to VOIP.
I’m concerned about the loss of service aspect. We’ve still got a working analogue phone line, for the moment, but loss of internet would mean the end of pretty much all business systems, Box Office, finance, membership, incoming telephones and more. I’m currently looking at backup options be it 4/5g or Starlink, but they’re relatively expensive options to backup an internet connection that has gone down for maybe 5 minutes in the last 5 or so years. Another option is to look into tethering a phone to the internet router, as I usually have a decent amount of data left every month, and limiting network use to just the low bandwidth business systems for the duration of the main connection outage.
It’s a real concern that I think we’re only just waking up to. The other aspect from a residential point of view is that these modern VoIP phones need power, so in a power cut?