SMPF ( shared metallic path facility ) was pretty much the default way ‘independent’ ISP’s provided broadband ( BT providing dialtone , someone else provided broadband ) many years ago , Sky and Talk Talk together with BT represented something like 75% of the market using Openreach lines , both those major ISP’s invested heavily in LLU ( local loop unbundling ) whereby they provided their own telephony services alongside their broadband services , eliminating BT any involvement in that customers service , they basically gave their broadband customers a choice , join us for telephony or find a new provider for your broadband, the overwhelming number of Sky and TT customers converted from SMPF to LLU , that was something like 10-15 years ago ( so not recently at all ) and for the last decade you cannot buy SMPF from Sky or TT even if you wanted to , even smaller niche providers can use LLU and if they bother at all with telephony, offer it via a VoIP solution, not via ‘BT’ .
There will be some legacy SMPF customers, ones that pay BT for line rental and a separate ISP for broadband only even then it’s incredibly poor value , so even those that were not given an ultimatum to find a new ISP if they insisted on remaining with BT for telephony, woukd realise what poor value SMPF became , BT full price line rental ( because obviously the no broadband discount cannot apply with SMPF , by definition that customer has broadband ) is around £28.40 , or £46.40 with included anytime calls , a similar price to broadband and ‘landline’ , it’s borderline idiotic to pay this and then pay the ISP probably at least £10-£20 on top of that price.
SMPF is with WLR withdrawal effectively dead , with BTDV there is no way to remain on a competitor broadband service and have ‘BT’ telephony, I dare say there are many who ‘think’ of service as a ‘BT line’ and incorrectly assume that BT has some involvement in their service when they don’t .
Every Sky customer, every Talk Talk customer , every Vodafone customer , not one of them that has a telephone service has any connection to BT telephony , they get their telephone service from their ISP and therefore BT DV is irrelevant to them ….they may have a separate rollout to be moved onto their own IP telephone service, but that’s not ‘DV’ , unfortunately some ISP call their IP telephone ‘DV’ adding to the public confusion, Sky to their credit, call their IP telephone service something different
