The 2027 analogue switch-off, explained properly.

If your business has a letter from your phone or broadband provider about “the digital switchover” sitting in a drawer, this guide is for you. It is written for business owners and office managers, not engineers. Where a technical term is unavoidable we explain it, and every factual claim here is backed by the sources listed at the end, mostly Openreach, Ofcom, GOV.UK and the House of Commons Library.

The short version.

• The UK’s analogue phone network retires on 31 January 2027. Openreach has said the date will not be delayed again.
• It is not just phones. Government guidance lists alarms, lifts, door entry systems, payment terminals and older broadband among the affected systems, because they quietly use the same wires.
• You have not been able to order a new analogue line since September 2023, and wholesale prices for the remaining lines double during 2026.
• As of May 2026 roughly 2.4 million lines were still to migrate, around half a million of them serving business premises.
• Handled early, this is a tidy project. Discovered in January 2027, it is not.

What is actually happening.

Nearly every phone line installed in the UK before the mid-2010s runs on the public switched telephone network, the PSTN: the copper network that has carried analogue calls since the days of the telephone exchange operator. That network is old, increasingly expensive to keep alive, and its spare parts are becoming museum pieces. So the telecoms industry decided to retire it and move everything to digital services that run over broadband.

Worth knowing: this is an industry decision, not a government programme. GOV.UK is explicit that the upgrade “is not a government programme and does not result from a government decision or policy”. BT Group is retiring its own network because it is wearing out. Government and Ofcom regulate how the migration happens, and as you will see below, they have shown teeth.

The dates that matter.

When	What happened
November 2017	Industry announced the PSTN would be retired, originally by the end of 2025
5 September 2023	National stop-sell: no new analogue lines, moves or upgrades anywhere in the UK
December 2023	Migrations paused after serious incidents involving telecare users; providers signed a safety charter
16 May 2024	BT Group reset the deadline to 31 January 2027 to allow vulnerable customers to be migrated safely
April to October 2026	Wholesale prices for remaining legacy lines rise three times, doubling over the year
31 January 2027	The PSTN and ISDN are withdrawn

The deadline has moved once, which is why some older articles still say 2025 and why some people assume it will slip again. Openreach has been unambiguous in 2026: the date is locked, and in June 2026 it stated the switch-off “isn’t going to be delayed again”.

What stops working.

Three families of service are withdrawn on 31 January 2027:

• Analogue phone lines. The classic line with a dial tone from the socket on the wall.
• ISDN2 and ISDN30. The digital lines that many office phone systems have run on since the 1990s. These are ceased outright from 1 February 2027.
• Broadband that rides on a phone line. ADSL, and the widespread fibre-to-the-cabinet connections that share an analogue line, are withdrawn with the line underneath them. Openreach’s own words: the withdrawal “impacts all services powered by copper lines, including ISDN, and ADSL and FTTC broadband”.

What does not stop working.

This is the part most articles get wrong, and it causes real confusion.

• Full fibre is unaffected. If your connection is fibre to the premises, nothing changes.
• Copper broadband without a phone line underneath survives January 2027. There is a product, sold as SOGEA, that delivers the same fibre-to-the-cabinet broadband without an analogue phone service attached. It is one of the official destinations for migration, not one of the casualties. Copper broadband is being retired eventually, but separately, exchange by exchange, as full fibre is built out. So if you were told “all copper dies in January 2027”, that is not quite right: the analogue phone service dies; copper broadband without a phone line lives on for now.
• Mobile networks are not involved.
• Virgin Media and KCOM run their own networks, separate from Openreach, and are migrating their own analogue customers on their own timetables.

And one more nuance for accuracy’s sake: Openreach has said there will be no “big bang” switch-off moment on 1 February 2027. Stragglers’ phone lines enter a managed wind-down with an emergency-calls-only fallback rather than going silent overnight. That is a safety net for the vulnerable, not a plan for a business: you cannot take card payments or receive customer calls on an emergency-only line, and ISDN gets no such grace.

The equipment nobody thinks about.

Phones are the part everyone knows. The expensive surprises live elsewhere. Government guidance lists the business systems affected: analogue phones, fire and other alarms, payment terminals, lifts, intercom and door entry systems, and broadband.

Walk your building and ask what plugs into a phone socket:

• Fire and intruder alarms that dial a monitoring centre over an analogue line. The fire and security industries are running a coordinated migration of alarm signalling, and monitored alarms may also have insurance implications, so involve your alarm company early.
• Lift emergency phones. Legally required to work; often forgotten because they only matter in an emergency.
• Door entry and intercom systems, especially in older or shared buildings.
• Card payment terminals that dial out over a phone line rather than using the internet.
• Telecare and personal alarms, if your organisation supports anyone who relies on one. These carry the highest stakes of the whole programme, which is why regulators watch them so closely.

None of this means everything must be replaced. Some devices work on a digital line as they are, some need an adapter, and some need modern equivalents that signal over the internet or mobile networks. The point of a survey is finding out which is which before the deadline decides for you.

What happens if you do nothing.

Three things, in escalating order.

First, you pay more. Openreach has published a deliberate schedule of wholesale price rises to push the migration along: 20% on 1 April 2026, a further 40% on 1 July 2026, and a final 40% on 1 October 2026, each step calculated on the 2025 price. By October 2026 the wholesale cost of a legacy line has doubled. These are wholesale prices, and how much each provider passes on varies, but the direction of travel is not subtle.

Second, you lose the ability to change anything. The stop-sell has been in force since September 2023: no new analogue lines, no moves, no upgrades. If your office moves or your provider changes, you get a digital service whether you planned for it or not.

Third, the deadline arrives on someone else’s schedule. After 31 January 2027 a forgotten phone line may limp on briefly in emergency-only mode, but anything that depended on it for its real job, alarm signalling, card payments, the lift line, does not get that courtesy in any way your business can rely on.

It is also worth understanding how seriously this is being policed. After serious incidents involving telecare users in late 2023, the industry paused migrations, signed a safety charter, and government published a Telecare National Action Plan. In December 2025, Ofcom fined Virgin Media £23.8 million for disconnecting telecare customers during its own migration. The lesson for any business: migrations done carelessly cause real harm, and the regulator is not treating this as paperwork.

What replaces it all.

For most businesses the destination looks like this:

• Connectivity: full fibre where it is available, or broadband without an analogue line underneath where it is not yet. The forced change is a genuine chance to upgrade rather than merely comply.
• Calls: digital voice services that run over the connection. Same numbers, kept through the move.
• Devices: modern signalling for alarms and entry systems, over the internet or mobile networks, usually specified with your alarm company or equipment maintainer.

One honest difference from the old world: an analogue phone was powered from the exchange, so a corded phone kept working in a power cut. Digital services do not, unless something provides power. Ofcom’s rules require providers to offer at least one way to reach the emergency services for a minimum of one hour in a power cut, free of charge for people who depend on their landline. For a business, the practical answer is simpler and better: put battery backup on the connection equipment and anything safety-critical, sized to your actual risk, and test it.

How to get ready.

The businesses that find this easy all do the same four things, in order:

1. Survey first. Find everything that touches an analogue line: phones, broadband, alarms, lifts, door entry, card machines. This is the step that prevents the January 2027 surprise, and it costs the least.
2. Choose destinations. The right connectivity for the site, digital voice for the numbers, and the right migration path for each device. Only now do you know what actually needs replacing.
3. Sequence the work. Alarms with your alarm company, lifts with your lift maintainer, connectivity and numbers with your provider, scheduled so nothing critical is ever without a path.
4. Migrate, test everything, then cease the old lines. The old lines are switched off deliberately, by you, after everything on them has been proven working somewhere better. Never the other way round.

Six months is a comfortable runway for most premises. It can be done faster, but every month closer to the deadline, engineer diaries and equipment lead times get tighter. The best time to have started was 2024. The second-best time is now.