There’s now just twelve-months until the UK reaches the first major ‘Stop Sell’ – after which new analogue telephone line services will no longer be available to purchase.

The clock is also ticking for businesses with analogue services still in use: by 2025, all telecoms services in the UK that rely on traditional analogue (PSTN) copper phones lines will be declared ‘End-of-Life’ and will be officially ceased.

Analogue phone lines
ADSL & FTTC (‘superfast’) broadband connections
ISDN phone lines
Other – e.g: analogue fax & alarms lines

What should your organisation do to prepare for the big switch-off? First, check out our handy guide, but to summarise, businesses have a few options:

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Move to a cloud-hosted system

Most businesses (and homes) will likely choose to migrate their phone system to a similar setup that is cloud hosted, in future relying on VOIP technology to route calls over their internet connection instead, and taking their old analogue number(s) with them. This is also the option most of the UK’s major telecoms companies will be pushing as major improvements to UK broadband infrastructure are rolled-out.

Your new phone system could be a dedicated hosted telecoms platform, or even telephony functionality enabled in another communications platform, such as via Microsoft Teams.

Upgrade to SIP

For many of those already committed to a traditional onsite PBX, moving to a SIP service is also a viable alternative – replacing outdated ISDN lines with digitally-registered SIP channels for cost effectiveness.

This a better option for those operating at large scale, or with extremely specialised telecoms hardware functions that don’t have cloud-based alternatives available.

Go Fully-Mobile

If your organisation is heavily distributed to the extent that it has no centralised inbound call handling, there’s always the option of moving entirely to mobiles – although numbering challenges mean this won’t suit everyone.

Alternatively, you can combine this with Option #1, and deploy work soft phones to staff mobiles for a super-flexible work phone system without all the extra plastic.

For communications support and expertise, please contact our team today.

Openreach’s progression to phase out the PSTN network as “End of Life” and cease it by 2025 has picked up speed, with new test switch off locations revealed.

The network subsidiary of BT have continued their transfer of customers away from legacy analogue Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) to a new fully digital network. The rollout aims to shift all clients to phone lines operating on the Internet Protocol (IP) route by 2025.

A list of services being decommissioned include analogue phone lines, ADSL and FTTC ‘superfast’ broadband connections, ISDN phone lines and other services such as traffic lights, motorway signs, analogue fax and alarms lines.

The IP routing system is in correlation with the nation-wide shift to fibre to the premise (FTTP) broadband to around 15 million homes and businesses that will rely on fibre optic cabling for the entire journey from the exchange.

Although 2025 feels a long time away, many businesses have already made the switch to an all-digital model with their communications setup moving to the cloud, calls being conducted over IP routing and enabling the opportunity for advanced video calling.

Lineal are here to make this migration over to a digital future as smooth as possible. Check with us to assess which analogue phone line services your business or organisation still uses and to find out whether your area is part of a published FTTP roll out in the near future.

Additionally, Openreach have announced 86 new copper network switch-off locations covering approximately 500,000 UK premises. This marks a rapid expansion from the original two test locations of Mildenhall and Salisbury where legacy PTSN services and its associated WLR hardware were removed from the commercial market.

James Lilley, director of managed customer migrations at Openreach stated that “ultimately, the plan is to withdraw all services that rely on the old PSTN by December 2025 and, from that point on, communications providers will own the delivery of voice services. We are upgrading the UK’s digital infrastructure as we build our full-fibre network to 25 million homes and businesses by 2026”.

To learn more about how Lineal can help your business or organisation’s migration to the digital future, follow the link for details or drop us a message on [email protected]