Network access provider Openreach (BT) has revealed that they will finally withdraw their old Fibre Voice Access (FVA) product from 1st December 2024. The service has long since been superseded by retail broadband ISPs launching their own IP / VoIP based digital phone services.
In case anybody has forgotten, FVA enabled a broadband ISP to offer a public switched telephone network (PSTN) quality voice service to customers over their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines. In order to deliver this, they built an Analogue Terminal Adapter (ATA) into the optical modem (ONT) that goes on your wall, which was able to support two analogue phone ports.
However, FVA was perhaps a bit of an awkward and awkwardly timed product and, as stated earlier, retail ISPs have now largely opted to launch their own IP (Internet Protocol) based voice solutions that connect via your router rather than through the ONT – avoiding the need to take a special service from Openreach.
The FVA service never really took off, and Openreach stopped selling it to new customers on 31st March 2020. The change today is that they’re going to completely withdraw FVA from 1st December 2024, which will of course affect any existing customers that remain (virtually all of those should have already been moved to different products by now).