Our copper line walk around house phone dropped dead, checked the line with a 1940's STC black bakelite POP unit and heard the dial tone ok so that meant the exchange line was ok and my walk around phone was really dead.

Then I wondered if the old POP would actually work and was amazed to find it would dial out, connect and worked absolutely like it did 50 years ago! Dial out ok, dial in ok.

Back in Business!!

Looks like the lines back to the exchange and also maybe part of the exchange is just the same as it was 50 years ago (that's the Pendle Hill exchange in Sydney).

Fred.

All of the Telstra exchanges recognise tone or pulse dialling but, sadly, this isn't carrying over to the VOIP services offered by the NBN. I am not sure what TPG Fibre allows though it is only available in blocks of flats anyway.

The last place I lived, I had two phone lines and an AWA table phone on one line and an STC wall phone on the other and both worked well. Both were the familiar black Bakelite jobs. I wish I could say that I was looking forward to setting that up again but unfortunately I just don't have the need for two phone lines that I seldom used anyway.

You can get an adaptor that makes these phones work on a VOIP service. I think GTC has pasted a link before. These work by converting the pulses to a DTMF tone but apparently are not ACMA approved.

I think GTC has pasted a link before.

Dialgizmo: https://www.dialgizmo.com/

Not sure how it will go with NBN.

Fred: if you have been converted to NBN, by agreement with NBNCo Telstra will disconnect the copper 18 months after the NBN "go live" date in your area.

According to my sources who have NBN, Dialgizmo works fine with old rotary dial phones.

Thanks guys, GTC we are NOT NBN converted yet, maybe next year or the year after.

Guess i'll have to drop into Officeworks and buy a new walk around 2 receiver job like the one that failed.

The STC POP has only 3 drawbacks.
!/ its too heavy to walk around.
2/ you only get as far as the cord allows you.
3/ I cant figure out how to text on it...…………………………………..I'M ONLY KIDDING!!!!!

Fred.

we are NOT NBN converted yet, maybe next year or the year after.

-- or maybe the 12th of Never, if you're lucky.

Hear Hear. I am still on ADSL with no plans to shift, if it ever arrives. My area was due when NBNCo decided to shutdown its applications for cable connections due to their lack of foresight with capacity. Good one, Kevin Rudd, and those who followed. A bipartisan dog's breakfast if ever there was one.

Without getting too political the reason the NBN is a stuff-up is because the Rudd government created a new owner for the network who had no idea of the complexity or how it could be accomplished. Telstra was told "don't bother putting in a tender for the NBN because you won't get it..."

Then when Tony came along (followed by Malcolm) they stupidly decided to change from FTTP to FTTN because they thought it would be cheaper and only a little inferior to FTTN. How wrong they were, as we can see by the massive blow-out in expected costs and take-up.
The service providers were not required to guarantee a minimum standard of service or download speed and so they scrimped to make more profit.

Now because of the complaints about inadequate service and speed from the FTTN particularly where customers are at the limits of the copper from the node they belatedly decided that the way to go was FTTK (fibre to the kerb - much superior to FTTN). Now what this means is that all the shiny new FTTK will be rolled out in the eastern states and the old unwanted FTTN still on hand is being shunted off to the poor suckers in WA. We expect to have a NBN service where 70% will be FTTN. Thank you NBN...There we go then.

PS: this is only my opinion....

Telstra was told "don't bother putting in a tender for the NBN because you won't get it..."

It didn't help that the CEO of Telstra at the time was that confrontational goose Trujillo. Gone but not forgotten.

Sol and the three amigos - the Rip Van Winkle years of telecommunications. I'll never forget either, try as I might.

The Commonwealth should never have committed to the NBN. They should have simply done what was done before with one condition - for every four metro connections a network owner must connect a rural customer. That would ensure that everyone got a connection. Companies like Telstra and TPG would have jumped at it and probably built duplicate networks so there was at least some wholesale competition.

Instead there is this government-owned behemoth that is immune from the ACCC and has special laws in place so it is more or less the only wholesale provider.

Trujillo did threaten to roll out a fibre network in competition but decided to shoot through instead, earning that infamous "Adios" from Rudd.

Back in 1995 Telstra was considering the adoption of a national broadband network based on HFC. A Telecom Research Labs paper was presented at INTELEC95 (under the auspices of IEEE) entitled "Availability Modelling of POTS on a Hybrid/Fibre Coax Network - A Power Perspective" .

This paper outlined the importance of maintaining the plain old telephone service as a lifeline service (as it had always been). It proposed a network of fibre hubs complete with back-up power with distribution to homes using coaxial cable (also back-up powered). A so-called customer service unit would have a coax link to a STU (equiv to a gateway router) and a copper pair to the telephone outlet. The complete setup would be powered essentially by Telstra (as it had always been) and there would be no need for UPS's at the customer premises as there is now with the current NBN system. As such the plain old telephone would be maintained as a lifeline service which would continue to work through flood and fire in 99% of cases.

This system would have been far superior to FTTN (and even FTTP) imo, because it would have reliable back-up power during mains power outages, while still providing high speed internet via coax cable, plus the simplicity of the POTS for those who don't have, or don't want a complex smart phone (which requires daily care and maintenance) for everyday telephonic communications.

If anybody wants a copy of the paper then pm me.

Anyway to answer the question: copper still supports pulse dialling, NBN does not. End of story.

I'm not surprised that the old STC phone still worked as they were well made in the past. Provided that the phone has not been damaged, the most common problem fault in old phones is a break in a conductor in the handset/receiver cord near the point that the cord enters the handset/receiver because that is the point that gets bent and stressed the most. After that the other likely problem is the carbon mic 'packing'. I have an old Ericsson phone dated 1898 which still works as well as it did when it was new. (That is it sounds like you are talking through a drain pipe but you can still be heard OK!)

Whether or not the exchange still accepts decadic dialing is another matter. If it is a Telstra exchange then it should but I have heard that phone services provided/resold by other telcos as an add-on to an ADSL service may not if the SLIC is one of theirs not Telstra. (Reliable info is a bit hard to get as these telcos do not like to give out technical details of their equipment.) The NBN is another matter again.

Some years ago at a travelling Telstra demo trailer where I had a chance to examine the modem that was to be installed with FTTP it was supposedly compliant with a tech spec that did support decadic/pulse dialing and therefore was supposed to allow connection of alarm dialers, medical alert callers etc. However the Telstra bloke could not actually say what dialling DTMF or decadic was supported. (He was rather puzzled by my question which suggested that he did not know what decadic was.) Since then I have not been able to get access to a FTTP installation to make any tests.

I did away with a Telstra landline 18 months ago because I got fed up with the likes of iiNet and the other clowns stealing my good pair to connect their ADSL service for somebody else in the street. (I would then have to spend 2+ hours on hold trying to contact a Manila call center to get the problem fixed. Usually I would be told "You must get electrician check your house!" as a line fault was not in their script.) The line from my house is now connected to FTTN and out of curiosity I stuck a phone on the line. There was a voltage on the pair so it has something on the other end but no tone of any sort. (I consider the cost for an NBN internet service is too high for my limited needs so I will stick with 4G wireless broadband.)

In previous posts I covered various ways that an old phone can be made to work on the new systems and most likely the NBN. A pulse/tone converter is required to dial out and from my tests, the Dialgizmo works very well. The only issue I identified was that dialling a ten digit number with a No.10 or No.12 rotary dial takes longer than a push button keypad and the switch at the other end of the line may time out.

The other potential problem is that the ring output from the NBN connection may not be sufficient to drive an old electromechanical bell motor. As yet I have only been able to try this on line simulators and it seems to depend on how the bell motor has been adjusted.

Do any of the members of this site have a FTTP NBN connection and if so have they been able to test if the phone port will ring an old phone?

Andrew

Do any of the members of this site have a FTTP NBN connection

The only person that I know who has FTTP lives at Windsor (NSW), which is one the early areas of the rollout before the Libs canned universal FTTP.