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 have come to the conclusion that the closer people are to what may be called the front lines of government ... the easier it is to see the immediate underbrush, the individual tree trunks of the moment, and to forget the nobility the usefulness and the wide extent of the forest itself.... They forget that politics after all is only an instrument through which to achieve Government.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“When I am convinced of any principle, it is only an idea which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“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)