Openreach Switch Off – Its STARTED!

As we reported last year BT Openreach plan on turning off the Public Switched Telephone Network in December 2025, (see previous blog) , and will stop selling new services from 2023.

WHAT’s the LATEST?

Ahead of this, the city of Salisbury has been used as a pilot site, and new phone line orders will be on “stop-sell” in the town from 1st December 2020, as at that point Full fibre to the premise broadband will have been deployed to 75% of Salisbury. Existing live WLR services in Salisbury will continue to work as they do now until December 2022, when they will be turned off.

In the smaller location of Mildenhall new orders will be on stop sell from 4th May 2021, again being withdrawn from service in December 2022.

WHAT NEXT?

The stop sell products in these two locations are: service transfers, working line takeovers, adding broadband to voice lines, bandwidth changes , start of stopped lines and migration to FTTC broadband products. If an individual premise can order FTTP broadband, then only FTTP will be available: if it can’t, then analogue phone line and FTTC broadband can still be ordered as normal.

Openreach intends to follow this initial trial with further stop sell activity at 117 FTTP Priority exchanges from 29th June 2021 and a second tranche of 51 FTTP exchanges from 5th October 2021.

We will keep you posted as we get confirmation of the areas / exchanges impacted.

WHAT’s my ALTERNATIVE?

Now ISDN has had it’s hayday, there is now a much simpler, and cheaper alternative.  That alternative is VoIP or Hosted PBX,  – cloud based phone systems – think of phone lines over the internet rather than the copper cables that ISDN connections use. . You could look at cloud based Hosted PBX as the newer model of ISDN with one big difference. Hosted Voice phone systems are actually cheaper than ISDN, and that’s one of the main reasons for the ISDN switch off.   Here’s a quick overview of the main business benefits for using hosted VoIP: It’s very affordable/cost effective

• There’s no need for masses of on site equipment, you only pay for as many users as you need and calls are made through internet lines.

Easy setup & maintenance

• Because there is so little on site equipment, setting up and maintaining the system is a much simpler job than with a traditional telephone system.

Freedom

• The flexible nature of the technology allows you to easily add and remove users as you need. Physical location doesn’t matter, anywhere you’ve got an internet connection, you can have a number.

see our blog Benefits of a Hosted System   

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO PREPARE?

The first thing you can do to get prepared is to find out when your current ISDN contract expires. 2025 may seem like a long way off but it will come sooner than you think. Rather than signing up for another year with your traditional phone system, why not start looking into internet phone systems now and get ahead of the curve? Go to a few VoIP providers and get some quotes…….and call Trio Telecom today on 01727 221303