As you may be aware, the copper based public switched telephone network (PSTN) will be retired next year (December 2025 at the very latest), in what is the biggest change to the UK telecoms infrastructure in modern times. Recent reports have suggested that a third of UK businesses have no idea of this change, and those that are aware of it, only 75% of them have a migration plan in place. We work with thousands of businesses across the UK and over the last few months, this topic has been our biggest enquiry by far. We don’t feel this message has been particularly well publicised by the Government, and could lead to potential problems nearer to the deadline.
Urgent Telecoms Audit Needed – 2025 PSTN & ISDN Switch-Off:
In total, there are over 9.3 million PSTN lines that need to be migrated over, equating to 2.22 million UK businesses. ISDN (Integrated Systems Digital Networks) lines would also be impacted by this enforced change from BT Openreach. If you’re using PSTN or ISDN lines for services such as broadband (FTTC or ADSL), main lines, alarms, credit card machines, lifts for example, you will be impacted, and these will need to be changed before the 2025 deadline.
As a minimum, we would suggest doing a “Risk Assessment” on your current telecoms set-up (even if you’ve made recent changes to your main line, for example) to determine if your entire current set-up is future proof. Towards the end of last year, BT Openreach implemented a “Stop Sell” on a range of products and services, and a number of exchanges will have their services turned off sooner than others (something else to be aware of and is already happening in certain areas). We’re also seeing that prices for these “legacy” PSTN/ISDN services/products, have also been increased, in an effort to encourage businesses to make the necessary changes sooner. Similarly, there is also a fear in the industry, that when the 2025 deadline does arrive, there will be a lack of engineers/equipment available, to meet the inevitable demand.
We have been upgrading communications systems/set-up (where necessary), and you would be welcome to forward any recent invoices at no obligation, to ensure this is future proof.
