Consumers get a fallback when the old phone network switches off. Business lines do not.

A survey published on 26 August found that 45% of UK adults with a home landline are still unclear about what the analogue phone switch-off means for them. The research was carried out by OnePoll among 2,000 landline users, commissioned by the broadband provider Community Fibre, and reported by ISPreview. It is a consumer survey and the numbers in it describe households. The reason it is worth a business owner's five minutes is the asymmetry sitting underneath it. Households that miss the deadline get caught by a safety net. Business lines do not.

What the survey found

Half of those asked said their home phone matters to them, with 49% of that group naming emergencies as the reason and 36% relying on it when their mobile has no signal. Among people who have not yet switched, nearly half said they are not confident they know what they need to do, 47% said they had not seen enough information about the changeover, and 53% said they had taken no action at all to prepare. Only 12% had checked whether their equipment would still work afterwards. ISPreview added a sensible caveat: many respondents may already have been migrated by their provider without realising it, which is what a well run switch looks like from the customer's side.

Where businesses sit differently

Openreach's most recent figures, published on 31 July, put 1.5 million UK lines still running on legacy copper, down from 1.9 million in June. Roughly 350,000 of those are business premises. ISPreview reports that consumer lines will not face a hard disconnection on 31 January 2027 and that a temporary Emergency Voice Access service will catch households that have not migrated, with those users still needing to switch by 2030 as older exchanges retire at scale. Business lines get no equivalent protection. In ISPreview's words they will not benefit from the same protection and will need to go digital to avoid a sudden loss of service. If your firm is among the 350,000, 31 January 2027 is a hard date rather than a target.

The things nobody remembers are on a phone line

The survey's most transferable finding is that 48% of respondents did not know the switch-off could affect anything in the building other than the telephone itself. In a house that means telecare alarms, pendants and security alarms. In a business it means the card terminal in reception, the intruder alarm, the lift emergency phone, the door entry panel and the fire panel dialler. Openreach's own warning names payment terminals, alarms and emergency lift phones. These are the connections that were installed by a contractor years ago, are billed on somebody else's account, and appear on no IT inventory. Finding them is the actual work. Replacing them is usually straightforward once you know they exist.

The cost of waiting goes up again on 1 October

There is also a price clock running. Openreach has published a schedule of increases on Wholesale Line Rental through 2026: a 20% rise on 1 April from a base of £10.65, a 40% rise on 1 July, and a further 40% rise on 1 October. Openreach summarises the effect as prices doubling in the final three months before the network is switched off. Exactly what reaches your bill depends on what your provider passes on, but the direction is fixed. Keeping an old line has stopped being the cheap way to defer the decision and is now a rising charge for a service with a published end date five months out.

Engineers are the constraint

In the same 31 July update, James Lilley, Openreach's director of All-IP, said the switch-off was then six months away with no extension to the deadline, and that inaction is no longer about uncertainty but preparedness. The practical warning alongside it matters more than the exhortation. Openreach cautions that leaving the move late makes it harder to secure the engineering support needed before the deadline. The pool of remaining lines is shrinking, which means everyone still on one is trying to book the same weeks. That is the argument for moving in September rather than in December.

Three jobs worth doing this month

First, list every line the business pays for and every device plugged into one, including the ones that sit on a contractor's bill rather than yours. Second, ask your provider in writing which of your services still run on Wholesale Line Rental or ISDN, and what each one moves to. Third, put a date in the diary for the switch that is not in January. The phones themselves are usually the easy part. The awkward items are the alarm and the lift, because those need the installer involved as well as the phone provider, and that is two diaries to line up rather than one.