One Month Until Openreach Stop Selling New UK Analogue Phone Lines

Openreach’s (BT) long road toward completely switching off their old copper-based Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) in December 2025 is set to hit a major milestone on 5th September 2023, when it places a UK wide “stop sell” on sales of new Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) and related broadband ISP products.

The move, which will not impact existing users of these products (until the 2025 deadline), means that anybody looking to buy a traditional analogue copper phone line rental (WLR and SMPF) service from a provider for the first time (new order) – including any linked broadband services (e.g. FTTC, G.fast, ADSL) – will no longer be able to do so.

However, the exception to this rule is fully unbundled (MPF) lines, such as those sold by various ISPs like TalkTalk and Sky Broadband that have invested to gain more control over BT / OR’s lines – enabling them to sell cheaper and more flexible copper-based broadband and phone products. Such ISPs will be able to continue selling related products to new customers post 5th September 2023. But that won’t last forever and eventually (post 2030) even the old exchanges will be retired.

The stop sell move is thus most relevant to ISPs with a large based of regular (WLR and SMPF) phone and broadband lines, such as BT, Zen Internet and many others. But the good news is that Openreach has spent the past few years developing alternative copper-based broadband products that don’t need to depend on the old PSTN/WLR services.

Naturally, Openreach’s ultimate goal is to get everybody moved on to their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines, but not everybody is covered by that yet. Consumers in those areas will thus still be able to take broadband via special versions of the ADSL (SOTAP), FTTC (SOGEA) and G.fast (SOGFast) products – these are essentially standalone copper-based broadband lines, albeit with no analogue phone service attached.

The key difference above is that anybody in a WLR/PSTN “stop sell” area who orders or upgrades to one of those new broadband-only (SOTAP, SOGEA, SOGFast) lines may not get a phone service included by default (i.e. this becomes an optional add-on). Customers who want to retain a home phone service will thus need to ensure that their ISP has launched a digital (IP-based) phone solution (e.g. BT’s Digital Voice product).

As we’ve discussed before, digital phone services are a bit different and often involve customers needing to plug their existing phone handsets into the back of a broadband router (assuming it has an FSO/FXO phone port) or Analogue Terminal Adapter (ATA) device (these plug into the LAN port on your router), rather than the old BT/OR Master Socket (e.g. NTE5A, NTE5C) on your wall.

Some providers, such as BT, have already run into problems with their Digital Voice service (here), which highlights some of the caveats with the new approach and its extra complexity (e.g. the need for battery backup during power outages) and thus why it’s so important for consumer-facing ISPs to have the right solutions in place to ensure a smooth migration when the time comes.

On the other hand, the industry has known this change was coming since before 2017 (example), thus there’s really no excuse for a retail provider not being prepared for it by now. But as BT’s example shows, other providers are still likely to experience some problems and complaints during the transition.