Openreach Stops Selling New UK Analogue Copper Phone Lines

Openreach (BT) has this morning confirmed that they’ve formally introduced their long-planned UK wide “stop sell” on sales of new Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) and related broadband ISP products, which is part of their aim to completely withdraw the old copper-based Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) by December 2025.

As we’ve said before, this does NOT impact existing customers of these products (until the 2025 deadline), unless you switch provider/package as the old service types will no longer be available. So anybody looking to buy a traditional analogue copper phone line rental (WLR and SMPF) service from a provider – including any linked broadband services (e.g. FTTC, G.fast, ADSL) – will no longer be able to do so and must instead take an IP-based alternative (more on that later).

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.

Fully unbundled ISPs will technically be able to continue selling the older products to new customers, but that won’t last forever, and eventually (post 2030) even the old exchanges will be retired. But we should point out that most of those providers have also already introduced IP based phone / Digital Voice style alternative products of their own too.

Nevertheless, the stop sell move is currently most relevant to ISPs and phone providers with a large base of regular (WLR and SMPF) phone and broadband lines, such as BT, Zen Internet and many others. But the vast majority of those providers have already introduced alternative copper-based broadband products that don’t need to depend on the old PSTN/WLR system.

James Lilley, Openreach’s Director of Managed Customer Migrations, said:

“As long as anyone can remember, the vast majority of phone calls in the UK have been handled by BT’s public switched telephone network (PSTN) – an analogue system which connects people using specific phone numbers.

But over time, the PSTN’s become outdated and difficult to maintain. Skills and parts are increasingly difficult to come by and new digital services like Voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing and a whole range of apps have become more popular and effective for people communicating with one another.

Back in 2017, BT saw this coming – signalling their intention to retire the PSTN network by the end of 2025 – and ever since then, we’ve been working to withdraw any Openreach products that work over the PSTN, including Wholesale Line Rental (WLR).

WLR is used by a number of our Communications Provider (CP) customers, and we’ve been working closely with them for years to help them prepare for the change.

As part of that process, we’re now taking the significant step of ending the sale of WLR across the UK. That means from today, when CPs’ customers sign up to a new contract – or when they switch, upgrade or re-grade their service via their provider – they’ll be moved onto a new digital line rather than an analogue one.

We’ll continue to do everything we can, working closely with our CP customers, to upgrade vulnerable customers and those customers using Critical National Infrastructure as safely and smoothly as possible and we have the processes in place to ensure this happens.

Ideally the new service will be delivered over our brand new Full Fibre network – which is already available to 11m homes and businesses nationwide – but, where that’s not available, we’ll move them onto a digital alternative.

We’ve already made lots of progress getting customers to ‘go digital’. Since 2020 we have gradually stopped selling copper services in exchanges where we have built full fibre. This covers more than 500 of our exchange areas – covering some 4.6m premises, so far and will continue at pace.

We’re determined to deliver a world-class, modern and reliable communications service for the entire UK and today is another important step towards the UK’s digital transformation.”

As above, 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 / VoIP – based) phone solution (e.g. BT’s Digital Voice product).

Digital phone services are a bit different from the old analogue service 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 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. Vulnerable users (e.g. pensioners) should also make their provider away of that status as they may be able to get extra support.

However, many providers have long since already begun shifting customers on to the replacement products. But it’s fair to say that the biggest stumbling block is likely to be in third-party products and services (e.g. alarms and telecare services), many of which haven’t yet fully adapted to this change.