Ask a business owner whether the PSTN switch-off affects them and you will usually get one of two answers. Either “we’ve already moved to VoIP, we’re fine”, or “we’ve got full fibre broadband, so it’s sorted”. Both answers are about telephones. The switch-off is not really about telephones.
On 31 January 2027, the copper network that has carried UK phone calls for more than a century is switched off. That date has moved once already — it was December 2025, pushed back thirteen months after serious incidents during telecare migrations elsewhere in the industry. Openreach has since been clear that it will not move again, describing the old network as fragile enough that remaining on it is now the greater risk.
Roughly 1.9 million UK lines still haven’t switched. Many of them belong to businesses that believe they have already dealt with this.
Walk into a lift and look at the little phone
A passenger lift must legally have working two-way emergency communication. It is almost never used, rarely tested, and in a very large number of buildings it runs over a copper line installed by the lift maintenance company — not by whoever manages the telecoms.
When that line stops working, two things happen at once. The lift becomes non-compliant. And somebody trapped inside it cannot call for help.
Nobody’s IT provider is going to spot this, because it was never on their inventory. Nobody’s lift engineer is going to raise it either, unless asked, because they are there to service the mechanism.
The list most businesses have never made
Over the years, all sorts of things have quietly been plugged into spare phone sockets. Each of these is using the network that is being switched off:
- Fire and intruder alarms that notify a monitoring centre or a keyholder. The alarm may still sound locally — but nobody gets called.
- Lift emergency phones, as above.
- Card payment terminals. Older ones dial out over a phone line. Newer ones often keep a copper line as the backup for when wi-fi drops. That backup is the part people miss.
- Door entry and gate systems, particularly on managed premises and schools.
- Telecare and resident call pendants. Openreach has treated these as the highest priority in the entire migration, for obvious reasons.
- Lone-worker alarms, franking machines, and — yes, still — fax machines in legal, medical and insurance workflows.
- ADSL and FTTC broadband, which run over the same network and are also retiring.
The full fibre trap
This is the single most common misconception, and it is worth stating plainly.
Having full fibre broadband does not mean your phone lines and connected equipment have moved across.
These are frequently billed and installed separately, by different suppliers, at different times. It is entirely normal to have excellent fibre broadband installed in 2023 and an alarm signalling line from 2011 sitting on copper in the same building. The fibre does not migrate the alarm.
You may already be stuck
Since September 2023 there has been a national stop-sell on copper services. You can keep what you have until the switch-off, but you cannot buy new copper lines or, in most areas, modify existing ones.
In practice that means a business needing to add a line, move premises or reconfigure its phone setup may simply find it cannot. If that has already happened to you and nobody explained why, this is why.
There is also a commercial dimension nobody advertises: wholesale prices on the legacy copper products have been deliberately increased to push the final migration. You may be paying more each month for a service that is about to stop working.
What actually happens on 1 February 2027
Openreach has said there won’t be a single moment where everything goes dark — unmigrated lines move to a basic emergency voice service until they’re switched across. It is worth being accurate about that rather than overstating it.
But for a business, that is a poor position regardless: no reliable service, no ability to make changes, and connected equipment that may have failed some time earlier. The retirement is also happening exchange by exchange, so many areas are affected well before the final date.
The only sensible first step
Make the list. Walk your premises and write down everything that plugs into a phone socket, then contact whoever supplied each device and get written confirmation of what it is moving to. Not a verbal assurance — written.
That is genuinely the whole job at this stage, and it is tedious rather than difficult. The reason it doesn’t get done is that it sits between three suppliers and belongs to none of them.
If it would help to have someone do that walk with you and chase the suppliers, that is something we do at no charge — partly because it is the right thing to offer with a deadline this close, and partly because it is impossible to advise anyone sensibly without seeing the list first.
An honest guideAI for smaller organisationsWhat actually goes wrong, where it genuinely earns its keep, and when the right answer is to wait. Includes a free readiness assessment.Read the guide