On 31 January 2027, Openreach switches off the analogue phone network that most of us have used for our whole working lives. The deadline was originally the end of 2025. It was pushed back to give people more time. It is not being pushed back again.
If your business still has a traditional phone line, an ISDN connection, or anything that quietly plugs into a phone socket, this affects you. Here is what is actually happening and what to do about it.
What is being switched off
The PSTN is the copper phone network. It carries ordinary landline calls, and it also carries ISDN, which many small businesses used for their office phone systems. From 1 February 2027 those services stop, and everything moves to calls carried over broadband instead.
Openreach has said there will be a temporary safety net for customers who have not moved in time, so lines will not simply go dead overnight. But Openreach’s own description of it is that it is temporary, limited and more expensive than the modern alternatives. It is a holding measure, not a plan.
It is not just the phones
This is the part that catches businesses out. Desk phones are the obvious thing, but over the years all sorts of equipment has been connected to phone lines because it was the easy option at the time:
- Intruder and fire alarm panels that dial out to a monitoring centre
- Lift emergency phones
- Door entry systems
- Card payment terminals
- Fax machines, which still exist in more offices than you would think
- The “spare” line in the server room that the broadband router came in on
None of these will work once the line they depend on is gone. Some can be moved to a digital line. Some need replacing. The important thing is to find them now, while there is time to do something about it.
What we found when we looked
A fairly typical example from businesses we have helped: an office of around fifteen people with a phone system installed years ago, still running on two ISDN lines. The phones themselves were the least of it. The alarm panel used the same line, the card machine in reception was on an old analogue socket, and the only person who knew which line was which had left the year before. Once we had a list, the move itself was straightforward. Working out the list was most of the job.
What a modern phone system looks like
The replacement is cloud telephony. Calls travel over your internet connection, the system lives in the cloud, and your team uses it from a desk phone, a laptop or the app on their mobile. Someone working from home answers the same number in the same way as someone at their desk. There is no box on the wall to maintain and no engineer to call when you want to add a person.
Our cloud telephony service is built on 3CX and priced on capacity rather than headcount. You pay for the number of calls that can happen at once, not for every person who might pick up a phone: concurrent internal calls are £29 each per month, concurrent external calls are £4.25 each per month, and numbers are £2 each per month. Call queues, voicemail to email, call recording and the mobile and desktop apps are all included, and we manage the whole thing alongside your IT. It runs on our usual 90-day rolling agreement, with no long-term contract.
What this means for a business with 5 to 50 people
You have a few months, and that is enough, but the businesses who leave it until January will be competing for installers and engineers with everyone else who left it until January. There is also a practical dependency: a phone system that runs over broadband needs decent broadband. If your connection is marginal, that needs sorting first.
Done in the right order, the switch is an improvement rather than a chore. Most businesses come out of it with a better phone system, a lower bill and one less supplier to chase. The costs are published on our pricing page, so you can see what it would come to before you talk to anyone.
One thing to do this month
Walk round the building and list everything that plugs into a phone socket. Phones, alarm panels, the card machine, the lift, the fax. Then check your phone bill for any line you do not recognise. That list is the starting point for everything else, and it takes half an hour.
If you would like us to do that with you, talk to us about cloud telephony. We will look at how your business uses phones today, tell you what still depends on the old network, and give you a clear picture of what a 3CX system would cost and what it would change, well before the January deadline.