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:
“Whenever the society is dissolved, it is certain the government of that society cannot remain ... that being as impossible, as for the frame of a house to subsist when the materials of it are scattered and dissipated by a whirlwind, or jumbled into a confused heap by an earthquake.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)
“In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds ... for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Among all the world’s races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Your scheme must be the framework of the universe; all other schemes will soon be ruins.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)