Getting ready for digital phone lines

Visit our Full Fibre pages to find out about the benefits of moving to Full Fibre.

The best thing to do is contact the company that sold or maintains the equipment and ask them if it will work on a digital phone line. You can also check the equipment manufacturer's website.

If you provide equipment which uses the telephone wall socket to access the network, it would be good for you to test your equipment at a test lab, which some service providers already offer. Openreach will also have its own test lab where you can test your equipment and find out what will work and what will need to be replaced.

By the end of 2025 analogue lines will be withdrawn and replaced by digital phone lines provided over FTTP and SoGEA, although there will always be exceptions in some areas, where specific needs remain. 

As Service Providers need to migrate their customers to digital phone lines we've announced that from after September 2023, we won’t accept orders for new analogue lines and will limit what can be done to existing lines.  This action is called “stop sell”. 

To minimise the number of analogue lines being added to the network, when a telephone exchange can provide FTTP to 75% of the premises it serves we’ll stop selling analogue services in that area and reject those orders. This has already started to happen, so far we've announced that we’ll stop selling copper products in 220 locations by January 2022. Every quarter we’ll let service providers know which telephone exchanges, and areas, will go into the “stop sell” category. We’ll always give the industry 12 months’ notice before a telephone exchange is put into this category. Stop-sell covers new supply, working line take-overs (such as moving house), changing service provider, restarting stopped lines, upgrading to a higher bandwidth package and contract changes.