The dates that actually matter
Openreach will permanently retire the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and ISDN on 31 January 2027. But that final date is misleading as a planning anchor:
- September 2023: national stop-sell — no new PSTN lines or FTTC broadband, and no changes to existing legacy services.
- Through 2025–2026: exchange-by-exchange stop-sell has expanded rapidly. By early 2026, Openreach's stop-sell covered well over a thousand exchanges and millions of premises.
- End of 2025: the point by which providers advised business customers to have migrated, to leave room for audits, porting and testing.
- 31 January 2027: final switch-off. Anything still dependent on copper stops working.
Industry research has repeatedly found businesses underprepared — with a significant share still assessing options or without a post-PSTN solution in place. The risk is not misunderstanding the date; it is discovering dependencies too late and then queueing for engineer capacity alongside everyone else.
It is not just your phones
The switch-off affects anything that rides on a traditional line, and these are the items that catch businesses out:
- Alarm and intruder systems
- Lift emergency lines
- Door-entry and access-control systems
- CCTV feeds on legacy lines
- Card payment / EPOS terminals
- Fax lines still used for regulated correspondence
Digital voice also depends on local power — where an old copper handset drew power from the exchange, an IP phone needs mains power and, for resilience, battery or mobile failover.
Why this is a buying moment, not just a chore
Migrating off PSTN is the natural trigger to modernise: hosted VoIP and UCaaS bring call handling, mobile and desktop apps, CRM integration and multi-site resilience that legacy lines cannot. Handled well, the switch-off lowers cost and improves capability at the same time. Handled late, it becomes a scramble.
What to do now
- Inventory every line and every device on it — including the alarms, lifts and terminals nobody remembers.
- Decide your voice model — hosted VoIP, UCaaS or SIP — against how your teams actually work.
- Plan power resilience — battery backup or mobile failover for continuity-critical sites.
- Port in waves — revenue-critical sites first, with testing and fallback routes.
The capabilities that answer this
Handled well, the switch-off is the trigger to modernise the whole connectivity and communications layer — not just swap a phone line. That usually means:
- Managed network & SD-WAN: resilient, monitored connectivity to carry your new IP voice and cloud traffic, with failover built in.
- Cloud voice / UCaaS: hosted telephony with mobile and desktop apps, replacing legacy PBX and ISDN.
- Zero Trust secure access: as more services move to IP and the cloud, securing access becomes part of the same conversation.
- Disaster recovery & continuity: power resilience and failover for the continuity-critical systems (alarms, lifts, payment lines) that the switch-off puts at risk.
How we help
Open Way Technologies runs an independent audit of your lines and dependencies, recommends the right IP replacement for how your business works, and matches you with the right managed network, cloud voice and continuity provider — at no cost to you. Because we are provider-neutral, the plan is built around your sites and systems, not a single vendor's product set.