UK telco claims to have marked major milestone on road towards switching off old copper-based phone platform
Leading UK telco BT has ramped up the pace of its plans to evolve its national communications network by switching off the legacy Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) in December 2025, and has revealed the implementation by its Openreach broadband provision division of a UK-wide “stop-sell” on sales of new analogue Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) and related broadband ISP products.
The announcement forms the latest part of BT’s ambition to make good on its commitment to switch off its analogue communications network by 2025. This follows the announcement made by Openreach in 2019 that the PSTN will have reached the end of its life by 2025, and that new, digital services will be in use.
BT believes that over time, the PSTN will become outdated and difficult to maintain. In addition, it said legacy network skills and parts are increasingly difficult to come by, and new digital services such as Voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing and a whole range of apps have become more popular and effective for people communicating with one another.
To realise its plan on a national basis, BT is having to transition more than 14 million traditional lines across the UK onto new digital services. Following the decision to shut down the PSTN, it was agreed to test processes for migrating customers to fibre services and, ultimately, withdraw legacy copper services and the wholesale line rental (WLR) products that rely on them.
The programme is intended to result in homes and businesses not being able to buy copper broadband if they are upgrading, regrading or switching telecoms provider, and instead will only be able to order fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP or full-fibre) broadband networks. Voice services will be an add-on to broadband, rather than offerings in their own right.
In August 2021, Openreach alerted users that if they have anything connected to a phone line, such as a care or security alarm, they will need to check with the equipment supplier whether their devices could work over the new fibre network.
Even though a third of businesses were still using ISDN as their underlying communications infrastructure, BT insisted that comms providers will have to comply with a stop-sell order in 2023. There have also been fears that older telephones – currently powered by local telephone exchanges – could be cut off from the new network if there is a power cut. In this scenario, Openreach said users may have to “do something different” to make home phone calls.
Copyright: Computer Weekly
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England and Wales councils unprepared for PSTN withdrawal in 2025
Freedom of information act request reveals worrying finding that over half of councils in England and Wales have no strategy for the prospective withdrawal of traditional PSTN communications networks
In 2020, BT-owned Openreach began its programme to stop selling traditional copper-based communications products nationally in preparation for withdrawal of services based on the technology by the end of 2025, yet even though the programme has continued apace with hundreds of exchanges upgrading to fibre links, most councils across England and Wales still have no strategy for the proposed wholesale line rental (WLR) withdrawal of public switch telephone network (PSTN) and integrated services digital network (ISDN) services.
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