The PSTN switch-off is January 2027: a practical checklist for UK businesses
The deadline for retiring the UK Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is now 31 January 2027. Businesses that still use analogue or ISDN services should treat the move as an operational project, not simply a telephone-handset replacement.
Ofcom explains that traditional landline calls are moving to internet-based services such as Voice over IP (VoIP). Openreach has also confirmed the January 2027 deadline. The important first step is to identify everything that still depends on an old telephone line.
What to include in your audit
- Published business numbers, direct-dial numbers, hunt groups and call queues.
- Alarm panels, lift phones, door-entry systems, telemetry, payment terminals and older fax equipment.
- Remote sites, home workers and temporary locations that may have separate lines.
- Inbound routing used outside office hours or when a site is unavailable.
- Broadband, router and power dependencies introduced by digital calling.
Plan the migration around continuity
Keep an accurate list of the numbers that customers use and confirm which numbers must be ported. Decide how calls should route during the change, and test inbound and outbound calling before cancelling any legacy service. Where a line supports a non-voice device, confirm compatibility with its supplier rather than assuming that an analogue adaptor will reproduce every characteristic of the PSTN.
A digital service also needs local power and connectivity. Consider an uninterruptible power supply, backup connectivity and network-level call forwarding so that an outage at one location does not make the business unreachable.
Adepteo can help review existing numbers, plan number porting and design a hosted VoIP service around the way your team actually handles calls. Contact us to start a migration review.