Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper

 

Openreach is warning British businesses that the old phone network shuts down in less than a year, with half a million commercial lines still unmigrated.

BT Group's infrastructure arm is switching to an all-digital, IP-based service over fibre. To speed migration, it's hiking charges on legacy products.

Deadlines for the cutoff have slipped several times, but the telecoms giant is now bent on finally burying the copper-based public switched telephone network (PSTN) by January 31, 2027, and Openreach is already working to kill off any services that use it.

Those products come under the umbrella term of Wholesale Line Rental (WLR), and Openreach stopped selling them nationwide in 2023 to prepare the way.

Openreach claims all technical barriers to migration – including protections for vulnerable telecare users – are resolved and the deadline is "locked in," so BT customers need to make sure they are ready.

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