Analogue lines
An analogue telephone line enables, via an installed wall socket, the connection of an analogue device, such as a telephone, modem or fax machine, to the telephone network.
Although they’ve been the most reliable solutions to date, PSTN and ISDN are rapidly becoming out of date technology, and expensive to operate and maintain. Openreach plans to invest instead in fibre infrastructure rather than further invest in a new version of the PSTN (which is essentially Victorian technology). Moving to new technologies will open the door to exciting opportunities to develop more reliable and future proof products and services for decades to come.
Openreach will be switching off services at each exchange in turn. The first stage is to announce a “stop sell” date for each exchange. After this date no new affected services can be ordered and changes to existing services, no matter how minor, cannot be made. There are already over 200 exchanges that will be in the Stop Sell phase by January 2022. A list of the exchanges currently identified as Stop Sell can be found here. Two years after the stop sell date all services cease at that exchange.
September 2023 has been announced as the national ‘stop sell’ date – the point at which all exchanges will have reached their stop sell date. The project completes in 2025 as the last exchanges reach their shutdown date. The big analogue switch off project ends in 2025. From this date its all-IP or nothing.