The landline switch-off: what changes, when, and what you need to do

The old analogue telephone network — the one that has carried landline calls since long before the internet — is being switched off. Every landline is moving to a digital service that runs over a broadband connection instead.

For most households this is a small change. You keep your number, you usually keep your handset, and calls work much as before. But there are two situations where it matters a great deal, and they are the reason this page exists: your phone will not work in a power cut, and alarms or telecare equipment connected to the old line may stop working.

If either applies to you, skip ahead — power cuts and what might stop working.

What is actually changing

The old network (its technical name is the PSTN) is being retired. Your phone service moves onto your broadband connection instead. In practice:

• You keep your phone number. It does not change.
• You keep your handset, in nearly all cases. It plugs into the router instead of the wall socket, or into a small adapter if the phone lives in another room. Providers say “nearly all” rather than “all”, so test yours.
• Your provider has its own name for it. BT and Virgin Media, TalkTalk and Vodafone all call it Digital Voice; EE calls it Digital Home Phone; Sky calls it Internet Calls. Plusnet does not sell a home phone service at all and points its customers to EE. Different names, same change.
• If you already have full fibre, your phone is probably already digital. Many people have been moved without noticing.

The simplest way to tell where you stand: look at where the telephone cord goes. Into the wall means analogue. Into the router, or into a small adapter, means it has already moved.

The timetable, honestly

This is the most commonly mis-reported part of the switch-off, so here it is carefully.

BT Group plans to retire the analogue network on 31 January 2027. That is BT’s own commercial decision, not a government deadline and not a single industry-wide one — other providers are working to broadly similar timescales. The government has been explicit that this is not a government programme.

It is not a cliff edge. Openreach expects some lines still to be connected on that date, and has said it will run a fallback voice service from 1 February 2027 that keeps people connected until everyone has moved. So nobody’s phone goes dead on 1 February because they missed a deadline. Openreach also said, as recently as July 2026, that there is no extension to the date itself — both things are true at once.

The real pressure is money, not the date. Openreach has been raising the wholesale price of the remaining analogue lines steeply and says openly that the purpose is to drive migration. Basic line rental rose 20% on 1 April 2026, another 40% on 1 July 2026, and a further 40% on 1 October 2026 — roughly doubling the pre-rise price of £10.65. That is what is actually moving people, and it is why your provider is writing to you.

How far along is it? The trajectory matters more than any single number:

When	Analogue lines still to move
February 2026	about 2.8 million (Openreach’s own site)
June 2026	about 1.9 million
July 2026	about 1.5 million, of which roughly 350,000 are business premises

So roughly 400,000 lines a month were moving over that summer — fast, but with 1.5 million still to go and six months left at that point. In July 2026 Openreach’s Director of All-IP, James Lilley, said the switch-off was “just six months away and there is no extension to the deadline.”

One caveat on those numbers, because it affects how much weight to put on them: the June and July figures are Openreach statements reported by the trade press, not published on Openreach’s own site, which still shows the February count. We have cited where each came from. These figures move quickly — always check the month attached to any number you read, including ours.

One more thing worth knowing: Openreach stopped selling new analogue lines anywhere in the UK back in September 2023, and is progressively closing them exchange by exchange. In practice a “stop sell” bites when you try to switch, upgrade or change your package — it does not force an immediate change on its own.

The power-cut problem

Most readers come here for something else and stay for this.

Full detail: will my digital landline work in a power cut? covers exactly what Ofcom requires of providers and what it only expects, who gets the equipment free, how to ask for it, and the corded-phone trap that undoes most people’s arrangements.

The plain fact: a digital landline runs through your broadband router, and the router needs mains power. The old analogue line drew its power from the telephone exchange, which is why it kept working when the lights went out. The new one does not. No power, no phone — and that includes 999.

The protection, stated accurately. Ofcom’s guidance is that providers should have at least one solution available that gives a minimum of one hour of access to emergency services during a power cut, and should provide it free to customers who are dependent on their landline. Two honest caveats: this is Ofcom guidance rather than binding law — the binding duty is the more general one to ensure uninterrupted access to emergency organisations — and Ofcom deliberately does not specify what the solution must be. It names a mobile phone where there is signal, or a battery backup unit, as examples.

Who should ask. Ofcom’s expectation is that providers proactively identify customers at risk and that any customer can request the solution. Two groups count as dependent on their landline: people who rely on it for reasons of disability or accessibility, and people with no other way of calling 999 — which in practice means no usable mobile signal at home.

Ask. Do not wait to be offered. Providers signed a voluntary charter with government in December 2023 committing to protections, and they undertook to work towards more than the one-hour minimum where battery backup is provided. But the obligations largely only bite once the provider knows your circumstances, and the offer is not always made.

The detail almost everyone misses: a battery that powers your router still needs a corded telephone. Ofcom says so explicitly — providers are not expected to make cordless phones work in a power cut, because a cordless base station has its own mains plug. If you have battery backup and only cordless handsets, you still have no phone. A cheap corded phone in a drawer solves it.

A small UPS on the router — and on the white Openreach box, which has its own power supply — extends this well beyond an hour. It is the one piece of equipment genuinely worth buying on this page.

If none of that applies, the fallback is a mobile, which makes mobile signal at the property the real question. See fix mobile signal at home and Wi-Fi calling explained — but note that Wi-Fi calling needs your broadband to be working, so it does not help in a power cut either.

What might stop working

Ordered by consequence, not by how common it is.

Telecare alarms, pendants and fall detectors. The serious one, and it has its own page: will my alarm still work after the landline switch? An estimated 2 million people in the UK use telecare, according to the government’s Telecare National Action Plan. Do not wait — tell the phone provider before the switch and confirm separately with whoever supplies the alarm.

Monitored burglar and fire alarms. These dial out on their own and the household often forgets they exist. Ask the alarm company, not the phone company.

Lift emergency phones. Relevant if you live in or manage a block of flats. Openreach said in February 2026 that more than 12,000 lift lines still needed upgrading, along with around 500 lines serving CCTV.

Card payment terminals, for anyone running something from home.

Care-home nurse call systems.

Older cordless phones and answering machines, sometimes. BT notes that a home phone more than about ten years old may not work with a digital adapter.

There is one pattern behind all of these, and it is worth stating plainly because it is where people get hurt:

The phone provider is not the alarm provider, and each assumes the other has handled it. The phone company knows the line is changing but not what is plugged into it. The alarm company knows the device but not when the line changes. Nobody owns the join except you.

The government’s own action plan is careful here too: testing of analogue telecare devices on digital lines has shown reliability can be affected by a range of factors, and it declines to publish a failure rate. We are not going to publish one either — figures that circulate online turn out, on checking, to describe analogue devices on the old network, which is a different thing entirely.

If you do not want broadband

A genuinely common worry, and the honest answer is more complicated than most pages admit.

Full detail: can I keep a landline without broadband? sets out what Ofcom actually says, what BT publishes for landline-only customers, which providers sell a phone on its own and which do not, and the words to use when you ring.

The regulator’s position is clear. Ofcom expects providers to offer options and says customers should not be forced onto high-speed broadband they do not want. A router may be installed purely to carry the phone service; that is not the same as buying an internet package.

The market is patchier than that. BT has a free upgrade path for existing landline-only customers that keeps the call package and line rental unchanged. Most of the others sell a digital phone only as an add-on to a broadband package — Virgin Media prices its home phone from £8 a month on top of a broadband bundle, Sky ties Internet Calls to a Sky broadband package, and Plusnet has no home phone product at all. We could not find a published phone-only product or price for a new customer at any of them; BT routes that enquiry to a phone call.

So: ring your provider and ask directly. Say that you want to keep a phone line and that you do not want broadband, and ask what they can do. If the first answer is a bundle, ask again and ask them to record the request. Prices and availability change, and none of the above is a substitute for asking.

If money is the concern, many people in this position also qualify for a social tariff — worth ten minutes of anyone’s time.

Watch out for scam calls

Migration letters are perfect bait. A caller claiming to be from BT or Openreach “about your line switching over” now sounds entirely plausible, because it is the sort of call you might genuinely expect.

Full detail: is this call really from BT? lists what BT publishes that it will never do on a call, explains why the number on your screen proves nothing, and gives a one-minute check you can start while the caller is still talking.

The rules that make it easy to spot:

• A genuine provider will not ask for remote access to your computer.
• A genuine provider will not ask for your password.
• Openreach does not cold-call householders to sell or arrange broadband; it works through your provider.

What to do: hang up. Then ring the company back on a number you looked up yourself — from the bill, or their website — and ideally from a different phone, because on an old analogue line a scammer could in principle hold the line open.

Reporting. Forward a suspicious text, or a scam caller’s number, to 7726, which is free and alerts your mobile provider. If the call is about your bank or money, hang up and dial 159, which connects you to your own bank and cannot be spoofed — note it is not free, and is often charged at national rate. To report fraud, contact Report Fraud on 0300 123 2040, or in Scotland call Police Scotland on 101.

What to do now, in order

Written so you can work through it on someone else’s behalf, which is how most people arrive here.

1. Find out whether the line has already moved. Look at where the telephone plugs in: wall socket means analogue, router or adapter means it has already switched.
2. List everything that uses the phone line. Walk the house and look for anything with a telephone cable coming out of it — alarms, pendants, monitored alarms, anything that dials out on its own.
3. Tell the phone provider about any alarm, and about poor mobile signal, before the switch date. Ask them to record it on the account. Their obligations largely start once they know.
4. Ask about battery backup if anyone at the address depends on the phone for care, or there is no mobile signal. Ask whether you also need a corded phone.
5. Contact the alarm or telecare provider separately, give them the make and model, and ask them to confirm in writing that it will still work. Neither organisation will do this for you.
6. Check the mobile signal at the property, so you know what the fallback actually is.
7. Test everything after the switch, the same day. Make and receive a call. If there is an alarm, press its test button and confirm with the monitoring centre that the call arrived and showed the right address.

Step 7 is the one everybody skips, and it is the one that catches a silent failure.

If it goes wrong

If the phone or an alarm stops working after a migration, treat it as an urgent fault, and use the word “vulnerable” — providers have specific obligations towards vulnerable customers and the word changes how the call is handled.

Your concern is legitimate, and there is a regulator’s decision behind that. In December 2025 Ofcom fined Virgin Media £23.8 million over its handling of telecare customers during the landline migration, after finding it had failed to follow its own vulnerable-customer policies: it did not properly identify and record telecare customers, and around 3,500 known telecare customers were disconnected. Ofcom made no finding that anyone was harmed — its case was about the risk — but the scale of the fine tells you how seriously it takes this.

If it is not resolved, raise a formal complaint, and note that since 8 April 2026 an unresolved complaint can go to alternative dispute resolution after six weeks rather than eight, or sooner with a deadlock letter. See how to complain about your broadband and the complaint letter generator.

If your broadband goes down, remember that your phone goes with it — what to do when your broadband is down covers that, and the lights on the white Openreach box explains what the Digital Voice adapter is telling you.

Where to get independent help

None of these is selling anything, and all of them are worth more than a comparison site on this topic.

• Ofcom — the regulator’s own guidance on the migration and on power-cut protections, linked in the sources below.
• GOV.UK — the Telecare National Action Plan, if you want the government’s full position on protecting telecare users.
• Age UK and Citizens Advice — both give free, independent advice and can help someone who is not online.
• Your local council’s adult social care team — the right starting point if nobody in the family knows who monitors an alarm.

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