Traditional phone lines switch off in January 2027. Here’s what to check

Openreach is retiring the copper telephone network, and the date is fixed. On 31 January 2027 the old analogue and ISDN lines stop working for good. New ones have not been available to buy since September 2023.

Most businesses have heard something about this. What they have usually heard is that desk phones need replacing, which is true and also the easiest part to solve.

The harder part is everything else sitting quietly on those same copper lines.

It is not just your desk phones

Copper lines have been the default way of connecting anything that needs to dial out. Over the years that has come to include a lot more than telephones.

If it dials a number without anyone picking up a handset, it is worth checking:

• Lift emergency phones. Passenger lifts are legally required to have a working connection to the outside world, and most older installations use an analogue line
• Door entry panels. The kind where a visitor presses a button and it rings through to reception or to a flat
• Intruder alarms and fire alarms that report to a monitoring centre
• Card payment terminals on older setups
• CCTV systems with dial in access
• Fax lines, if any survive
• ADSL and older fibre to the cabinet broadband connections

The pattern we see is that the phones get sorted in good time and the lift alarm gets discovered in February.

Five things to check this month

You do not need to be technical to do this. It takes an afternoon.

1. Walk to the lift. Find out who maintains it and ask what line the emergency phone uses
2. Look at the door entry panel. If it rings a phone rather than an app, ask who installed it
3. Ring your alarm company and ask how the panel communicates with them
4. Check the card machine. If it plugs into a phone socket rather than the network or a SIM, it needs attention
5. Ask whoever handles your broadband whether your connection runs over copper

Write down what you find. That list is the whole job, and having it in front of you turns a vague worry into a short set of tasks.

What replaces it

Calls move onto your internet connection instead of a dedicated phone line. The technology is usually called VoIP, and in practice it means your phone system lives in the cloud rather than in a box on the wall.

For most businesses it is an improvement rather than a compromise. Calls tend to cost less, numbers can be kept, staff can take calls on a laptop or a mobile as easily as a handset, and adding a new extension stops being an engineer visit. Our cloud hosted VoIP platform does exactly this.

Alarms, lifts and door entry each have their own digital replacement, usually involving a mobile signal or a connection over your network. Those normally sit with the company that maintains them rather than with us, which is why finding out who that is matters.

If you are not sure what you have

Most people are not. Buildings accumulate wiring over decades and nobody keeps a record.

We survey sites across Newcastle and the North East and tell you plainly what is running on copper and what is not. If work is needed we can handle the phones and the network side, and point you at the right people for the rest.

There is no charge for the survey and no obligation attached to it. With six months left it is worth knowing where you stand. Get in touch or call us on 0191 296 0111.