Although it’s clearly your ‘right’ to complain that the replacement PDPL service is in your view inferior in that the online management is much reduced, but in my opinion won’t get you very far …PDPL is only a transitional product, simply to enable phone only customers to keep service after PSTN switch off , and in part was always a sub optimal choice for BT , in that other products were available , namely taking a regular broadband service , either paid for by the customer , or a much reduced bandwidth (0.5Mb) broadband connection provided for free by BT just to enable Digital Voice while restricting any usable broadband access , but BT management knew this falls foul of the ‘it needs mains power and that is unreliable where I live’ brigade, PDPL doesn’t need a local power supply ,but it’s a costly and arguably an unnecessary complication as far as BT are concerned (other providers would simply refuse to supply telephony service ) and it’s only until copper pairs are entirely replaced with FTTP anyway , so for many will be replaced in the next few years , although for some much longer .
New customers can’t get PDPL it’s for the relatively few remaining phone only customers BT have , so it’s a relatively big investment for a few and constantly reducing number of customers, developing this PDPL into a directly comparable product to DV is just not cost effective (which is why your complaint won’t get anywhere , its a financial burden that no one other than BT has to bare ( given the most common moan BT is expensive compared to others ) , no doubt in part due to these type of obligations no one else has .
A final point , many phone only customers are just refuseniks, they make a point of deliberately avoiding broadband almost as a lifestyle choice ( the price of broadband and phone almost the same as a standalone phone service so it’s hard to argue it’s a financial burden ) the attitude being I don’t want broadband , and you just make me take it , and what’s wrong with the phone system we had anyway ? , an argument in that case is on line management is a relatively recent addition made available to customers in the recent past , and only of use to those that are ‘on line’ anyway , and for those that want things to be like ‘how they used to be’ , they have that with PDPL , it’s just like a phone service from 25 years ago before the general population had an online presence.
