Openreach has published a league table nobody wants to lead. It sets out how many analogue phone lines are still running on the old PSTN network across the UK’s ten largest cities, and London tops it by a distance: 235,934 lines still to convert, 12.92% of the city’s total. Nationwide, Openreach estimates around 1.5 million lines remain on copper, including approximately 350,000 business premises. The switch–off date is 31 January 2027. From today, 18 September 2026, that is 135 days — roughly nineteen weeks, or about ninety–four working days once weekends and the festive shutdown come out.
The detail that should concentrate the mind of anyone running a UK business is not the headline number but a distinction buried in the arrangements. Residential customers who have not migrated by the deadline will not be cut off cold: they are moved to a temporary Emergency Voice Access (eVAC) service so they can still reach 999. Business lines do not get that protection. For a company, 31 January 2027 is a hard cut–off. And the second detail compounds the first: the line at risk is frequently not the one anyone is thinking about. Organisations that migrated their main phone system two years ago and consider the job done are often still running payment terminals, lift alarms, door entry systems, security panels and building management kit over analogue lines that nobody has inventoried. This article sets out where the remaining lines are, why the last ten per cent is the hardest, and what a business should check in the time that is left.
What Openreach has actually reported
The new figures are a geographic breakdown of a programme that is, in aggregate, going rather well. Across the ten largest cities and their surrounding areas, roughly 90% of legacy lines — more than 6 million in total — have already moved to digital alternatives over the past five years. That is a substantial national infrastructure migration delivered largely without incident, and it deserves to be said plainly before the criticism starts. What remains in those areas is around 600,000 lines.
The city table is where the picture gets uneven. London has both the largest absolute number and the worst proportion: 235,934 lines outstanding at 12.92%. Liverpool is making the best progress of the ten, with just 42,351 lines left at 6.35%, followed by Manchester at 7.35%, Sheffield at 7.55%, Cardiff at 8.35% and Leeds at 8.62%. London is therefore running at roughly twice Liverpool’s rate of non–migration, and holds more outstanding lines on its own than the next several cities combined.
That is not a coincidence, and it is not simply that London is bigger — the percentage controls for size. The plausible explanations are structural: a dense concentration of small businesses in multi–tenant buildings where the line is not controlled by the occupier; a large stock of older commercial property with legacy systems wired in decades ago; a higher proportion of leased premises where responsibility for the telephony is genuinely ambiguous between landlord, managing agent and tenant; and a churn rate that means nobody in the building has institutional memory of what the lines in the riser actually do. Every one of those factors makes migration slower, and every one of them is worse in a capital city.
The single most telling figure, though, is not in the city table at all. Openreach says the national estimate of around 1.5 million remaining lines, including the 350,000 business premises, is unchanged since the end of July 2026. Two months of a five–month run–in have produced no measurable movement in the business number. Whatever is holding these lines back, it is not a shortage of publicity or a lack of awareness of the deadline. It is that the remaining lines are the difficult ones.
This is the part most likely to be misunderstood, because the reassuring version of the story has been widely reported. Consumers who have not switched by 31 January 2027 will not face a hard disconnection — they will be moved onto a temporary Emergency Voice Access arrangement so they retain the ability to call emergency services. That protection does not extend to business lines. A company still on an analogue line at the deadline faces a sudden loss of service, and “service” here may mean considerably more than a telephone. If the same line carries your card payment terminal, your lift emergency alarm, your intruder alarm signalling or your door entry system, the failure is not a communications inconvenience. It is a trading, safety and compliance event arriving on a known date, with no fallback and no grace period.
How the last six months look from here
The chronology below is deliberately weighted towards what is still to come, because that is where the decisions are. The dates that matter to a business are not the ones behind us.
The shape of that timeline is worth naming explicitly, because it is a familiar one to anyone who has managed a deadline–driven infrastructure programme. The technical deadline is 31 January 2027, but the practical deadline is considerably earlier — it is whenever the available engineering capacity gets booked out. Those are not the same date, the second one is not published anywhere, and it is the one that will actually determine whether a given business makes it.
Where the remaining lines are
The city comparison below shows the proportion of each city’s lines still on analogue, using the figures Openreach has published. Bar lengths are scaled relative to London, the worst performer, so that the differences between the others are legible; the figure on each bar is the actual percentage.
The final bar is derived rather than published: with more than 6 million lines migrated and around 600,000 still to convert across the ten city areas, roughly nine per cent of the total remains. It is included because it gives the others a reference point. A city sitting below that line is ahead of the national picture for major urban areas; London, at nearly one and a half times it, is the outlier that will absorb a disproportionate share of whatever engineering capacity is available in the closing months.
For a business, the useful reading of this table is not civic. It is a proxy for competition. If you are in London and you have not booked your migration, you are queuing behind 235,934 other lines in the same city, many belonging to organisations that will reach the same conclusion you have at roughly the same time. If you are in Liverpool or Manchester, the queue is shorter. Neither position changes what you have to do; both change how long you can afford to defer it.
Ninety per cent done, and the hard part remaining
The headline progress figure across the ten largest cities and their surrounding areas is genuinely impressive, and it is also the reason the final stretch is being underestimated.
Large migrations do not proceed at a constant rate, and it is a mistake to extrapolate from the first ninety per cent to the last ten. The early volume comes from the cases that are simple: a single line, a modern building, a business that owns its own premises and its own decision, a clean like–for–like replacement. What is left after five years of that is a residue selected precisely for being difficult — lines with no clear owner, lines in shared buildings, lines terminating in equipment whose supplier no longer exists, lines that nobody can identify the purpose of and therefore nobody dares to cease.
The stalled national figure supports that reading directly. If the remaining 350,000 business premises were simply unaware, two months of deadline coverage would have moved the number. It has not moved since the end of July. The obstacle is not information. It is that each of these cases requires somebody to do a piece of investigative work — find the line, establish what it does, identify who is responsible for it, choose a replacement, and book an engineer — and that work has no natural owner in most organisations. It falls between the facilities manager, the IT provider, the landlord and the finance team, and it stays there.
This is also why the October 2026 price doubling matters more than it first appears. A business running six analogue lines for ancillary systems, each costing very little, has had no financial pressure to investigate them. Double the price and those lines appear on a cost report, someone asks what they are for, and the investigative work finally gets assigned. The price rise is, in effect, the mechanism for forcing the discovery exercise that the deadline alone has failed to trigger.
The systems people forget are on the old network
The most common failure pattern in this migration is not a business that has done nothing. It is a business that migrated its main phone system, marked the project complete, and never enumerated everything else plugged into an analogue line. The list below reflects where those dependencies typically hide, with badges indicating how much attention each usually needs.
The top four share a characteristic that separates them sharply from an ordinary telephony outage: each is either a safety system, a revenue system or a security system, and the consequence of failure is immediate and external. A lift alarm that cannot reach a monitoring centre is a safety compliance failure with someone potentially trapped in the lift. A payment terminal that cannot dial out stops the business trading. An intruder alarm whose signalling path has gone silent may invalidate an insurance policy, and the policyholder may not discover that until they claim.
The seventh row — unattributed lines — deserves its own note, because it is the one that turns a two–week job into a three–month one. In older commercial buildings, particularly multi–tenant ones, it is routine to find analogue lines that appear on a bill and connect to something nobody present can identify. The temptation is to cease them and see what breaks. That is a reasonable strategy in September and a reckless one in January, and it is a great deal more reasonable if you do it deliberately, one line at a time, with the ability to reverse it — which is an option that disappears entirely once the network does.
What migration costs
The bands below are indicative planning figures for UK businesses, covering the discovery work, replacement connectivity, handsets or adaptors, migration of ancillary systems and the engineering time to install — not quotes. The variable that moves these numbers most is not headcount but the number of ancillary analogue dependencies, which is exactly the thing most organisations have not counted yet.
| Business size | Typical scope | Indicative cost to migrate | What you get for it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Micro business, 1 – 5 staff, single line | Line audit, hosted VoIP service, number porting, softphones or a handful of handsets, broadband suitability check | £300 – £1,200 | Numbers retained, calls that work from anywhere, and an end to a line rental that was about to double |
| Small business, 6 – 25 staff, one site | Full analogue line discovery, hosted telephony or Teams Voice, handsets, one or two ancillary systems migrated, network readiness check for call quality | £1,500 – £6,000 | A single migration event with the ancillary systems included, rather than a phone project followed by three surprises |
| Established SME, 26 – 100 staff | Site survey, PBX replacement, call routing and hunt groups rebuilt, several ancillary systems converted, resilient connectivity with a failover path, staff training | £6,000 – £25,000 | Telephony designed around how the business actually answers calls, with the dependency on a single circuit removed rather than transferred |
| Multi–tenant or older premises with many ancillary lines | Riser and line–by–line investigation, landlord and managing agent liaison, lift alarm and alarm signalling conversion, access control migration, staged cutover | £4,000 – £30,000 | Every analogue dependency identified and owned, including the ones that are contractually the landlord’s problem until the day they become yours |
| Multi–site business, 100+ staff | Estate–wide inventory, standardised platform across sites, per–site connectivity review, phased migration programme, number estate management, documented cutover and rollback | £25,000 – £90,000 | A controlled programme with a schedule you set, instead of a sequence of emergencies scheduled by whoever loses service first |
Set against those figures, two costs of delay are worth stating. The first is visible: legacy line prices were already set to double from October 2026, so the do–nothing option gets more expensive four months before it stops being an option at all. The second is not on any invoice — it is the premium attached to doing this work under time pressure, when engineering slots are scarce, when there is no room to stage a cutover across two quiet weekends, and when the discovery exercise that should have taken a month has to be compressed into a fortnight. Businesses that migrate in the autumn will pay the middle of these bands. Businesses that migrate in January will pay the top of them, if they can get a date at all.
Two ways to arrive at 31 January 2027
Reactive posture
Where a large share of the 350,000 currently sit
- The main phone system was migrated a while ago and the project was marked complete, with no audit of what else was on an analogue line
- Nobody owns the question — it sits between facilities, IT, the landlord and finance, and has done for two years
- Lines appear on the bill that nobody can identify, and the plan is to cease them and see what breaks
- Lift alarms, alarm signalling and payment terminals assumed to be the responsibility of whoever maintains them
- No check that the replacement connectivity can actually carry voice at acceptable quality during busy periods
- Migration timed for January, on the assumption that an engineer can be booked at short notice
- No fallback if the cutover goes badly, because the old service is being retired rather than kept in parallel
Proactive posture
Where Cloudswitched VoIP and connectivity takes you
- A line–by–line inventory of every analogue service on the bill, mapped to the system it actually serves and the person responsible for it
- One named owner for the migration, with the landlord and managing agent engaged in writing where the lines are not yours
- Unattributed lines investigated deliberately and reversibly, while reversing is still possible
- Safety and revenue systems — lift alarms, alarm signalling, payment terminals — migrated first, because they have the least tolerable failure mode
- Network readiness assessed before cutover, so call quality is verified rather than discovered on the first busy Monday
- Engineering slots booked early, with the migration staged across quiet periods you choose
- A documented cutover with a rollback position, executed while the old network still exists to roll back to
The difference between those columns is mostly sequencing, and sequencing is the one thing that cannot be bought back later. Almost every item in the right–hand column is available to any business today and unavailable to the same business in mid–January — not because it becomes more expensive, but because the preconditions disappear. You cannot stage a cutover across a quiet weekend if there are no quiet weekends left. You cannot keep a rollback position once the network you would roll back to has been retired. You cannot book an engineer early in the last fortnight.
Get your most recent telecoms bill and list every line, circuit and channel on it, including the ones with small monthly charges that have never attracted attention. Against each one, write two things: what it connects to, and who is responsible for that system. Most organisations find three categories. The lines they knew about and have already dealt with. The lines serving something specific — a lift, an alarm panel, a card terminal, a door entry system — which now need an owner and a migration date. And a third group nobody can account for, which is where the real work is. For that third group, contact the provider and ask what each line terminates on and when it last carried traffic; a line with no traffic for two years can probably be ceased, and one that carries a short burst at the same time every night is almost certainly an alarm panel reporting in. Do this in September and it is an afternoon with a spreadsheet. Do it in January and it is an incident.
Why this is a continuity and security question, not just a telephony one
It is tempting to file the switch–off under procurement: an old product is being withdrawn, a new one must be bought. That framing is what has allowed 350,000 business premises to leave it on a list for years. The more accurate framing is that a dependency your organisation has never had to think about is being removed on a fixed date, and the systems resting on it include several that are load–bearing for safety, revenue and insurance.
The continuity dimension is the one most often missed. Analogue lines had a property that their replacements do not: they were independently powered from the exchange, so a traditional phone worked during a mains failure. Digital telephony depends on your broadband connection and on local power, which means the resilience question moves from the network operator to you. For a business migrating now, that is an argument for thinking about the replacement as a connectivity design rather than a phone purchase — considering what happens to voice, alarm signalling and card payments during a power cut or a circuit failure, and whether a second path exists. A business that migrates a lift alarm onto a single broadband circuit with no battery backup has met the deadline and weakened its safety position, which is the worst of both outcomes.
There is a security dimension too. Moving alarm signalling, door entry and building management systems onto IP brings them into scope as network–connected devices, with everything that implies: they need to sit on an appropriate network segment, they run firmware that will need updating, they have default credentials that need changing, and they belong in an asset inventory. Under Cyber Essentials, that enumeration is precisely what the scheme exists to force. A migration is the ideal moment to get it right, because the devices are being touched anyway — and the worst moment to get it wrong, because a rushed January cutover is how a door entry controller ends up on the same flat network as the finance workstations with its default password intact.
The insurance and compliance angle is worth a direct check with whoever handles your policies. Intruder alarm signalling paths are frequently specified in policy conditions, and a change of signalling method may need to be notified and approved rather than simply implemented. Lift emergency communication is a safety requirement with its own obligations. Neither of these is difficult to handle when addressed deliberately with time in hand. Both are difficult to handle when discovered during a cutover.
The story at a glance
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| The deadline | The PSTN is switched off on 31 January 2027, after which ISPs, phone providers and BT fully retire the legacy network |
| Time remaining | 135 days from 18 September 2026 — roughly nineteen weeks, or about ninety–four working days |
| Lines still on copper | Around 1.5 million nationally, including approximately 350,000 business premises |
| Momentum | Openreach says that national figure is unchanged since the end of July 2026 |
| Progress so far | Roughly 90% of legacy lines — more than 6 million — migrated across the ten largest city areas over the past five years |
| Still to convert in those areas | Around 600,000 lines |
| Worst performing city | London: 235,934 lines outstanding, 12.92% of its total |
| Best performing city | Liverpool: 42,351 lines left, 6.35% |
| The rest of the named cities | Manchester 7.35%, Sheffield 7.55%, Cardiff 8.35%, Leeds 8.62% |
| Consumer protection | Residential customers who miss the deadline are moved to a temporary Emergency Voice Access (eVAC) service rather than disconnected |
| Business protection | None. Business lines do not get eVAC and risk sudden loss of service at the deadline |
| Commonly missed dependencies | Payment terminals, lift alarms, door entry systems, security and alarm signalling, building management technology |
| Price change | Legacy copper line service prices were already set to double from October 2026 |
| Capacity warning | Openreach has warned that leaving migration too late could make it harder to secure the engineering support needed before the deadline |
| Free first step | Audit your telecoms bill line by line: what does each one connect to, and who is responsible for that system? |
This story sits alongside several we have covered recently, and read together they describe one argument rather than five. LINX’s LON2 fabric passing 1Tbps is the natural companion piece: once telephony, alarms and payments all depend on your internet connection, the question of whether you have a genuinely independent second path stops being a networking nicety and becomes the thing your lift alarm rests on. VMO2’s cost cuts and the continuity risk they create is about the same dependency viewed from the supplier side. The BT email password reset flood is a reminder of what an escalation route looks like when you are a consumer–grade customer of a very large telecoms business — worth bearing in mind when choosing who migrates you. The new digital ID rules for alcohol sales make the point about point–of–sale dependencies from the other direction: more of what happens at a till is now a network transaction. And the end of security through obscurity applies squarely to the alarm panels and door controllers about to acquire an IP address — a device that was safe because nothing could reach it needs a different defence once something can.
Do you know what is still on an analogue line in your building?
Cloudswitched migrates UK businesses off the PSTN before the deadline forces the issue — a line–by–line audit of what you are actually paying for, hosted telephony or Teams Voice sized to how your business answers calls, and the ancillary systems handled as part of the same project rather than discovered afterwards. With engineering capacity tightening towards 31 January 2027, the useful thing to establish this month is not which product you want but how many lines you have.
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Nineteen weeks is enough time. Twelve will not be.
The businesses that come through this well will not be the ones that spend the most; they will be the ones that finish the discovery work early enough to choose their own cutover dates. Cloudswitched handles PSTN migration for UK businesses end to end — the line audit, hosted telephony and Teams Voice, number porting, the ancillary systems that nobody counted, and the connectivity and power resilience design that keeps a lift alarm working when the building does not. Start with the bill, and find out how many lines you actually have.
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London-based managed IT services provider offering support, cloud solutions and cybersecurity for SMEs.
