The UK’s old telephone network is entering its final chapter, but for Openreach, switching it off is proving to be about much more than simply disconnecting a phone line.
Behind the remaining connections are businesses with alarms and payment terminals, households relying on telecare equipment and customers who may not even realise they are still using the legacy network.
With the January 2027 deadline approaching, Openreach is now focused on reaching those final customers and making sure they move across safely.
James Lilley leads the Openreach team responsible for the migration which is responsible for making sure customers are moved off the old telephone network.
The hard part is what’s left
Openreach began its Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) closure around 2017, where at the time 16 or 17 million customers were using the network.
“Today, fewer than 1.5 million remain”, Lilley tells Mobile Europe.
“Most of those customers have now been moved onto digital alternatives, so the vast majority of the job has been done, and providers have done a great job of that.”
But the remaining customers aren’t necessarily the easiest ones to move.
This is particularly true for businesses, where an old telephone line can be doing far more than simply making and receiving calls.
“You’ve got lots of different things potentially connected to phone lines, like fax machines, alarm lines and payment terminals – things that you’ll see in typical businesses that not many know they are connected to the telephone network,” he says.
That creates a different kind of problem. Before a business can switch services, it needs to know exactly what is relying on the old connection.
“What we’re seeing now is a bit more of a switch away from having to tell people there’s a need to move, to actually getting them to take action,” he explains.
Why businesses are dragging their feet
There is no single reason why some businesses have not yet made the move.
Part of it comes down to something surprisingly ordinary: finding the right person to deal with it, Lilley explains.
“There’s a lethargy in business because you have to find the owner of the services and get the owners to take action,” he says.
“If you take a high street shop, for example, it’s no good trying to convince the person working in the shop to migrate the telecom services because they’re probably not responsible for paying the bill for the telecom services.”
Then there is the equipment itself. “Businesses are a little bit more complex, so there’s more things to think about than in the residential market,” he notes.
“If you’ve got an alarm in your business and it’s not digital, for example, it’s not compatible with broadband services. You might need to make some changes to some of the equipment you use in your business.”
January 2027 isn’t an instant cut-off
As the deadline looms, Openreach is keen to stress that there won’t be a single day when millions of customers suddenly lose their services.
“There isn’t a scenario where there’s going to be a mass ceasing of customer services, and lots of things stop working in January 2027,” he says.
However, that doesn’t mean businesses can ignore the deadline.
“If customers don’t move things, then there is ultimately a risk of disruption,” he adds.
Openreach has therefore developed alternative solutions for customers who have not migrated, which Lilley describes as a “lifeboat solution”, but relying on those solutions is not without consequences.
“It comes with disruption. It comes with a little bit of downtime, and ultimately customers still need to move away,” he says.
There is also a financial argument for making the switch sooner rather than later, he claims.
He continues: “As a wholesale provider, we’ve been increasingly putting our prices up over the last six months. There’s another big price increase coming in October.
“It’s actually often cheaper now to move onto the new network because of various incentives and offers that are in the market to get people to migrate.”
For businesses still sitting on the old network, he says, the calculation is becoming harder to justify.
“Businesses are paying more for something that’s old and more prone to failure, when the cheaper, more reliable like full fibre, is actually now cheaper to be on than these legacy services.”
Making the move easier for vulnerable customers
For some people, switching from the old network is more complicated than changing a broadband provider, for example, telecare users, who may rely on equipment connected through their telephone line, making a safe migration particularly important.
As a result, Openreach has introduced engineering support to help, who will go to customers houses, test that the device is working before a migration, move the customer over, plug it all back in and test that it’s working again before they leave.
The approach is already being used extensively, Lilley reveals.
For some landline-only customers, Openreach has also developed a way of moving them without requiring them to change their equipment.
“We’ve developed solutions where we can actually just migrate the customer in the background,” Lilley adds.
“It’s a bit of work in the network, a tiny bit of downtime, but essentially the customer doesn’t need to change any equipment. They don’t need to do anything on their premises, so you can move them over almost silently in the background.”
The switch-off is only the beginning
January 2027 may mark the end of the UK’s traditional telephone network, but it is not the end of the UK’s telecoms transformation.
Openreach has invested £15 billion in fibre upgrades and expects to have full-fibre coverage available to 25 million UK premises by the end of 2026.
The longer-term plan, Lilley claims, is to move customers away from copper altogether.
“As we close the telephone network, that massively reduces the power consumption of that network, so it’s great from a UK sustainability perspective,” he explains.
“The next thing after the PSTN is closed is we’ll be going on a programme over the coming years of closing those exchange buildings and moving customers off the copper networks onto the new fibre networks.”
However, for Openreach, then, the PSTN switch-off is not simply about turning off an old telephone system.
It is one stage in a much larger overhaul of the UK’s communications infrastructure.
“That’s really the big transformation the whole UK telecom industry is going through at the moment, as we move off copper onto fibre,” Lilley concludes.
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