The Government Telephone Preference Scheme (GTPS) is a British system for limiting outgoing calls from landlines if the network is overloaded during an emergency. Numbers registered under the GTPS will still be able to make outgoing calls if the service is limited. All telephones will still be able to receive calls.
There are three categories of use - the most essential are called Preference Category I, and are limited to 2% of lines of a telephone exchange. According to a British government document they are intended to be limited to "lines vital to the prosecution of war and to national survival". The second category - Preference Category II - are for lines needed for the community and these and Preference Category II are limited in total to 10% of the exchange. All other users are in Category III.
The scheme was established in the 1950s.
Phones on the scheme include armed forces headquarters, local authority emergency planning centres, emergency services such as police, fire and ambulance and public telephone boxes. Since 1992 the United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Organisation and Royal Observer Corps operational lines have been deleted from the scheme.
A similar scheme limiting mobile telephone access is called MTPAS (formerly ACCOLC).
The GTPS should not be confused with the Telephone Preference Service which is an opt out telephone list funded by the British direct marketing industry.
Famous quotes containing the words government, telephone, preference and/or scheme:
“I thought it a pity that some poor student did not live there, to profit by all that light, since he would not rob the mariner.... Think of fifteen Argand lamps to read the newspaper by! Government oil!—light enough, perchance, to read the Constitution by! I thought that he should read nothing less than his Bible by that lamp.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The telephone gives us the happiness of being together yet safely apart.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That ostracism, both political and moral, has
Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)