BT says it botched the transition of voice services on its fixed network from analog to voice over IP, and is “pausing all further Digital Voice switch-overs for customers who don’t want to move to the new technology straight away,” says Marc Allera, BT CEO, consumer division.
As it happened, BT underestimated both the customer confusion and the disruption power outages would cause for a service that formerly was network powered and often required new equipment to support broadband connections for those who did not have such service.
The pause will allow BT time to create resiliency solutions including hybrid phones that switch to mobile in case of local power outages; battery backup units; mobile-only replacements for landline service and better mobile service to support those alternatives.
“We underestimated the disruptive impact this upgrade would have on some of our customers,” says Allera. “With hindsight we went too early, before many customers, particularly those who rely more heavily on landlines, understood why this change was necessary and what they needed to do.”
The customer expectations issues are likely enhanced by the huge switch in use of voice services. Use of fixed network voice peaked globally about 2004. Since then, people have increasingly preferred mobile as the device and network for voice calls. In the United Kingdom, mobile voice usage has displaced fixed network voice, for example. Mobile call volume is an order of magnitude higher than fixed network voice volume.
Twenty years ago, as service providers began the transition to IP voice, great concern was expressed about the end of network power, as the vaunted “five nines” (availability at 99.999 percent of the time) levels of service would be ended.
Executives in most cases seemed not to factor in the abandonment of fixed network voice services and the replacement by mobility services. Customers quickly understood that mobile phones do not work if battery power is exhausted.
That was never the case for fixed-line services, where customers expected their phones would continue to work in cases where local power was lost.
In truth, powering issues had effectively grown for decades, even before the replacement of analog voice with VoIP. As consumers switched from corded phones to cordless, they already had begun to experience “loss of dial tone” whenever local power was lost.
The issue BT might have faced was that most younger consumers had moved off the landline voice network or never had such service.
That means a growing percentage of landline voice users are older and presumably less used to new technology, which exacerbates the technology transition. BT in this case appears not to have thought through the cultural issues it would face.
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