Openreach Relax Stop Sell Rules in FTTP Priority Areas to Aid Migration of Old Lines

Network access provider Openreach has announced that they will soon temporarily allow a “bulk relaxation” of FTTP Priority Exchange “Stop Sell” rules across the UK (excluding Northern Ireland), under certain criteria, in order to help migrate old lines off their legacy Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) service.

The FTTP Priority Exchange programme typically involves the ongoing rollout of gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband lines. In short, Openreach stops the sale of new copper line services (including WLR) in exchange areas where they’ve reached 75% ultrafast (full fibre) coverage. This effort also complements their semi-separate migration of traditional legacy voice (PSTN / WLR) services to digital all-IP technologies.

However, not everybody is yet ready to go fully FTTP, which can sometimes create an obstacle for retail ISPs as Openreach tries to get everybody off legacy line services. As a result, the network operator appears to be informing ISPs that they will allow a bulk relaxation of FTTP Priority Exchange Stop Sell rules between 16th February and 30th October 2026.

This appears to mean that ISPs in these areas will also be able to migrate customers to copper-based digital broadband alternatives, such as SOGEA (FTTC / VDSL2) and SOTAP (ADSL) or even their alternative for analogue phone lines (SOTAP Analogue); the latter is a last resort and usually only aimed at existing telecare users with no other options.

The catch is that internet and phone providers will still need to show (e.g. evidence of past communications and marketing attempts) that they have attempted to migrate / contact customers on several occasions and the customer has then “either ignored or rejected the FTTP appointments“.

Providers will also be asked to demonstrate that FTTP is inappropriate for a line to ensure migration by the January 2027 deadline, which may for example occur when the customer has given specific business reasons why they are unable to upgrade to FTTP (i.e. these may include environmental, geographical or customer risk challenges, and customer premises engineering time constraints).

Openreach’s official briefing on this keeps the details private, although they did eventually provide them after we made a request. But for matters like this we really wish they’d be more transparent on their briefings as the issue of migrations to FTTP or modern copper-based digital alternatives remains of wide public interest.