The PSTN Switch-Off Is January 2027 — What Midlands Businesses Still Need to Do

The original deadline was December 2025. Openreach pushed it back to 31 January 2027 after it became clear that too many businesses, care providers and domestic customers had not made the transition in time. That extension was the right call. It was also, for many businesses, an excuse to put the whole thing back in the drawer and deal with it later.

Later is now running out. If your business is still running on traditional analogue or ISDN phone lines, January 2027 is a hard stop — not a target date that will shift again. When the network goes dark, it goes dark. Lines that have not been migrated will simply stop working.

What exactly is being switched off?

The Public Switched Telephone Network — PSTN — is the copper-wire analogue network that has carried UK telephone calls since the Victorian era. It also carries ISDN, the digital upgrade to PSTN that businesses moved to in the 1990s. Both are being retired. Openreach will decommission the infrastructure by 31 January 2027 and will not maintain it beyond that point.

What replaces it is Voice over Internet Protocol — VoIP — where calls are carried over your broadband connection rather than a dedicated telephone line. Hosted VoIP, where the phone system sits in the cloud rather than in a box on your wall, is the most common replacement for business ISDN systems. The calls sound the same. The numbers can be ported across. The change is largely invisible to callers.

The part most businesses have not thought about

Phone calls are the obvious concern, but the PSTN switch-off affects a wider range of systems than most people realise. Anything that communicates over a traditional phone line will stop working — and that includes equipment that has nothing to do with making calls.

Door entry systems with telephone diallers — where a visitor presses a button and it rings through to a phone — typically use analogue lines. If your door entry panel dials out over a PSTN line, it will stop working in January 2027. The same applies to lift emergency phones, which are legally required to connect to an external line. Intruder alarms that report to a monitoring centre over an analogue line. CCTV systems with remote dial-up access. Payment terminals on older infrastructure. Fax lines, if you still have them.

We deal with all of these systems. The number of sites where we have been asked to look at a door entry or alarm system in the past twelve months and found it still running on an analogue line is significant. In every case, the client knew the PSTN was going but had not connected that fact to the specific piece of equipment in question.

What the audit should cover

The first step is an honest audit of everything on your site that currently connects to a phone line. Not just handsets — everything. That means walking the building with someone who knows what to look for. A door entry panel with a grey cable going into a trunking run and disappearing into the wall may be on a PSTN line. The lift shaft emergency phone almost certainly is. The alarm panel in the comms cupboard may be.

Once you know what you have, the migration options are generally straightforward. Door entry systems can be upgraded to use SIP — the internet protocol equivalent of an analogue line — or replaced with IP-native panels that communicate over your network rather than a phone line. Lift phones have specific requirements under BS EN 81-28 and need to connect to an always-on line with battery backup; there are compliant IP solutions for this. Alarm diallers can be replaced with IP or GSM communicators.

The phone system itself is usually the simplest part of the migration. A hosted VoIP system replaces your ISDN lines with a broadband connection, your physical desk phones with IP handsets or softphone apps, and your PBX box with a cloud platform. Numbers port across, call routing is configured in a web portal, and the whole thing can typically be stood up in a day for a small to medium business.

Broadband readiness

VoIP calls are sensitive to the quality of your internet connection in a way that data browsing is not. A slow or unreliable broadband connection that is acceptable for emails and web use can produce poor call quality — drops, delays, echo — when it is also carrying voice traffic. Before you migrate your phone system, it is worth assessing whether your current broadband is adequate.

For most businesses, a standard fibre broadband connection is sufficient. If you are running a contact centre, a multi-line reception, or a site with high concurrent call volumes, a leased line or bonded connection gives you dedicated bandwidth and a guaranteed quality of service. We can advise on connectivity as part of a telephony project — it is one of the areas where getting the foundation right makes everything else work properly.

How much time is there, realistically?

A straightforward phone system migration for a small business — ten extensions, one site — typically takes two to four weeks from survey to go-live, including number porting. A more complex migration involving multiple sites, legacy PBX integration, and non-telephony systems like door entry and alarms will take longer. Three to six months is realistic for anything involving significant infrastructure change.

January 2027 is eleven months away as of February 2026. That is enough time, but it is not unlimited time — particularly if you factor in the likelihood that demand for VoIP engineers and telecoms contractors will increase sharply as the deadline approaches. Businesses that leave migration until Q3 or Q4 2026 will find themselves competing for engineer availability and potentially paying more for it.

We carry out free site surveys for businesses in Coventry and the wider Midlands. If you are not sure what you have on your site, a survey will tell you — and you will leave knowing exactly what needs to change, what it will cost, and how long it will take. That is the only basis on which you can make a sensible plan.