Openreach Delay Pilot Closure of Two UK Exchanges Due to Active Customers
Network access provider Openreach (BT) has provided an important update on the planned (pilot) closure of their next two legacy exchanges in Ballyclare (9,500 premises in N.Ireland) and Kenton Road (9,500 premises in London), which were originally due to be switched off on 30th November 2025 but will now remain open a bit longer to help the remaining users migrate.
Just to recap. The operator is currently in the early pilot stage of closing around 4,600 of their 5,600 UK exchanges. This is occurring because only c.1,000 of these are needed to provide nationwide coverage of modern “fibre broadband” services (FTTC / SOGEA, FTTP etc.) – the Openreach Handover Points (OHPs or “Super Digital Exchanges“). The rollout of full fibre (FTTP) technology, combined with the retirement of copper lines and legacy services (ADSL, WLR, PSTN etc.), will soon make it economically unviable to support both the old and new exchanges.
The operator has thus long since developed a gradual plan for closing the thousands of older exchanges – known as the Exchange Exit Programme, which starts with an initial pilot of 3 exchanges and then extends to a closure of 105 “priority exchanges” by 2030 (i.e. taking place in four phases), with the rest then following through the early 2030s. The tentative dates for these have already been announced (here).
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Closing an exchange and migrating affected customers remains a highly complex process, which typically takes around 4-7 years (depending upon the complexity of each exchange) – starting with a Stop Sell of old products and eventually ending with everything being switched off. Only after that do Openreach and ISPs remove their physical kit, which can take a few short months.
What’s happened so far?
Earlier this week we reported that the first of three pilot exchange closures for this programme, Deddington (serving c.1,800 copper lines), had finally shut its doors a little ahead of schedule (here) – new digital lines are now being served and managed by the nearby Banbury Exchange (OHP). None of this is surprising, as Deddington was also one of the first UK areas to go fully FTTP.
By comparison, the next two pilot exchanges – Ballyclare and Kenton Road – are much larger and more challenging to address, and that’s intentional. Openreach needs to confront the hardest areas now and establish the best approaches for dealing with them, which will then inform their solutions when it comes to retiring thousands more in the future. Both exchanges were originally due to shut their doors on 30th November.
However, much as we reported last weekend (here), both of these exchanges currently still have some active consumer broadband and phone lines (i.e. they’ve not been migrated yet) – not many, but we were told is was “enough to hinder the closure”. Some other lines are also in the process of being migrated, but won’t all be shifted by the closure date. The operator has thus been busy working closely with ISPs, Ofcom, the Government (DSIT) and the Office of the Telecoms Adjudicator (OTA) to find solutions.
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Openreach has also been working with retail providers in an effort to try and identify what kind of users theses are (they’re currently investigating that alongside retails providers), since nobody wants to disconnect customers, particularly if some of them may turn out to be classified as “vulnerable“, or part of any other high risk or critical infrastructure (CNI) group.
What’s the latest update?
According to the latest private briefing on all this, which was posted on Wednesday, Openreach are still busy trying to identify whether any of those who haven’t yet been shifted off the exchange are “vulnerable” users. The operator is currently still reviewing their position over whether or when to cease consumer customers and are, in the meantime, continuing to work with everyone involved to exit the pilot exchanges safely.
“Whilst we continue to work this through, we’ve now confirmed with industry that where CPs [Communication Providers] have failed to migrate consumer customers’ assets prior to the deadline, Openreach will NOT cease on 1st December 2025, but services will remain subject to original termination notices – we will keep CPs informed of any future plans to cease these lines,” said a spokesperson to ISPreview.
In short, the exchanges will not now be closing this weekend as originally planned and Openreach are allowing more time to find solutions for the remaining lines, although they’ve yet to agree a new timetable for closure with providers. In the meantime, they’ve advised affected broadband and phone providers to continue trying to migrate their consumer customers to digital alternatives, including full fibre (FTTP) and SOGEA (FTTC).
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As we pointed out in the prior update, business lines aren’t so lucky, with Openreach making clear that disconnection will be the outcome: “If a CP fails to cease and/or migrate the services by the end of 30 November 2025, any live business assets which do not have an inflight order or have not been agreed as critical life impacting services, will be ceased by Openreach from the 1 December 2025“.
Hopefully we’ll learn what the revised switch-off dates will be in the near future.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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If adequate notice has been given to the customers and they fail to act they should be just cut off
They could be lifelines. CPs need to step up their act
Good idea, that will really make BT and co look good, I am sure they would love the bad publicity that would come with that.
It may be Openreach, but it is still BT and it is them that people will blame.
But carry on.
The customers should be written to and told they have to act and if they fail to response they are warned that their service will be cut off if thewy do not act. They say get 3 warnings
It could be a phone in a lift. The bill is paid by direct debit and the block of flats is now owned by an offshore company.
If the teams running this are not keeping to closure dates, how are they going to deliver the project?
These are the very 1st to close under this plan. It’s very ambitious and will be a steep learning curve for all involved. Processes will need to be tweaked and that will involve the whole industry..it’s going to be a painful and rocky experience for the 1st hundred, then has to be much more streamlined after that, by which time the PSTN will be history.
As time goes on more and more will have moved to FTTC with Digital Voice and FTTP. That’s the good news.
I think the purpose of the trials is to see where the long tails are and develop plans to deal with them.
@The real Witcher:
The time has missed the target dates on two out of three of the pilot sites.
They cannot afford to waste and will need to come up with the necessary remedies without delay.
@The Facts:
That is not an answer. The program managers can not rely on trends that will not necessarily address the specific scenarios that have led to the missed targets.
I would imagine that they have built in leeway in their plans to allow for these sorts of contingencies. “No plan survives contact with the enemy” (as someone once said), so a good plan allows for things to go wrong and for time to address the problems.
Plus the point of having pilots is to iron out any major issues. There will of course be issues with some future exchanges too, but nobody embarking on this sort of major project would do so without expecting problems and planning for them to happen.
@David:
The three exchanges are the pilot projects, so without doubt, there would have been time built into the plan to allow the assessment of outcomes, and to adjust the plan with additional/changed actions as necessary.
The problem here is that the cause of the issues that led to two out of three pilots missing the target dates appears to be open-ended. That is, it is not a procedural or technical problem with the plans as such; it is caused by external factors over which Openreach have no control, while the regulatory controls render the outcome as being open-ended. That is quite a problem, and one which would seem to be out of Openreach’s hands.
Judging by these pilots, middle to late 2030’s may be a more realistic time scale for the exchange exit strategy.
Thats a very long time, I think whats happening is a victim of the fact Openreach are relying on CPs for customers to be migrated, the business benefit is much higher to Openreach than is to the resellers.
@ greggles:
A key problem would seem to be that all the obligations are placed upon the service providers, with no stick to get Care Providers to play their part.
This is understandable, however, given that the Care Providers are likely to fall outside the remit of Ofcom. At some point, departments from across the government must intervene coherently if the government is to achieve its own ambitions in this area.
Having worked on some 15 exchange transfers from 250 line exch’s up To a 20,000 line one.
The first 5 exchange transfers i/we had call every ‘Subscriber’ (customer) before the transfer could take place – that took longer time than the physical work to connect up. By the time the latter transfers took place we had ‘automated’ systems in place to ensure we didn’t miss any customer or mis-connect any line; with 20,000 line transfer that completed in under 15 working days.
So I can see the initial Exchange Exit conversions will take longer than extended periods with much manual intervention including testing. Once they get that sorted I’m sure things will speed up.
Do you think that approach would work today?
A good deal of the process is intrinsically automated, but that does not address cases where there are end customers (none of them Openreach customers) that have not been migrated because of procedural issues or because of technical constraints with end user equipment.
I don’t think that’s relevant for this work. The customers aren’t retaining the same local loop and being migrated from one telephone exchange switch to another – the switch is closing and the e-side network is being retired.
Fred, just the situation with regards to Openreach and end user’s bears no resemblance to that one let alone the actual work in question.
This isn’t tons of copper connections being jointed to somewhere else and dissed on an MDF with a satisfying pull of tons of connections up a frame there should be very, very few connections using the MDF.
Should be a few copper connections that couldn’t be moved in advance due to vulnerable customers and that’s entirely down to the telecare provider and the provider of the retail service to the telecare service.
Leaving things to the last minute by the sounds of it! This has been on the cards for many years.
If alternative connectivity is available then without some sort of financial penalty to CPs they’ll continue to drag their heels.
BT Wholesale put this rather desperate post on LinkedIn four days ago… https://www.linkedin.com/posts/btwholesale_digitaltransformation-allip-networkmodernisation-activity-7399466461896949760-fWYm?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAAA1cxEBetw1nEfzPnsCy10AeNv1OGwPD54
So I gather they’ve essentially told CPs / ISPs to keep to the original messaging (probably until they’ve decided on a final closure date), but behind the scenes the actual exchange closure will take longer.
Looking at the post on LinkedIn this looks like the customers who missed out on the fibre roll out and/or database issues are coming back to haunt the switch off. Sounds like OR (or whoever) will need a special team of installers, database experts and even lawyers to sort out these lines.
The solution that would allow holding to cutover plans reliably is to create a bit of hardware that can go into street cabinet to provide true landline backwards compatibility for a few more years and naturally age the impacted lines out.
Something like SOTAP for analogue but in the street cabinet (or SOTAPfA) set up in the “receiving” exchange in the cutover).
Makes the transition more expensive up front but nothing so expensive as a delayed plan.
Yes, some street cabinets may not have space for yet another equipment type, focus CP change management on those lines with a specialist customer care team. Shock horror maybe contract that out to an available alt-net / telephone care provider to provision a new line or a 4G based telecast unit.
The core of the PSTN is being replaced. It doesn’t matter where you do the conversion to VoIP – customer premises, cabinet, poletop, shed outside the exchange – anything that uses a modem is fundamentally incompatible.
Don’t confuse the issue of holdouts – CPs or customers who have just ignored all comms – with the issue of equipment that cannot work on VoIP. They are two sets that interact, but they are two distinct sets.
Something tells me we’ll be reading similar stories until at least 2050…
I suspect that very few of the ‘active customers’ will still be around in 25 years time
Some of those lines will be mechanical equipment (e.g. safety phones in lifts) not people. Easily could be with us until 2050, especially in social housing sector.
Many of these “active customers” might not last long at all if their lifeline phones stop working. I notice that Virgin have be fined for not factoring vulnerable customers into their transition plans 🙁
Simples, move the remaining services wholesale price to say 20 times it’s current level, CPs will very quickly sort them out and get in touch