Getting ready for digital phone lines
For businesses who use phone lines to provide services
Welcome to the Openreach digital lines programme for industry
We define industry as anyone who sells, services or uses products that connect through the analogue telephone network.
Here you’ll find out about the programme and how it will affect you, your business and your clients. You may have also heard this referred to as all IP.
How does this affect my business or organisation that uses the analogue phone network to provide services to customers?
It’s likely that this change will affect anything that currently plugs into the existing analogue telephone wall sockets. This includes any equipment that you may provide to clients and customers or equipment they purchase to utilise the services you offer.
From now until the end of 2025, service providers like SKY, TalkTalk and BT, will need to contact their customers and make them aware that most people will need to move their existing products and services that use the analogue phone network, from the wall socket, to the router. This is because once a service provider migrates their customers from the current setup, to a digital phone line, the wall socket will only provide access to the internet and not the more traditional voice calls that currently use a landline.
In practice, once a customer has been moved to a digital phone line anything else plugged into the telephone wall socket may stop working, or need additional equipment to be purchased and plugged in to enable it to work.
What should I do now?
Now would be a great time to take an inventory of what you use in your offices and which products and services you provide to your clients and customers and check to see if they’ll work, when lines migrate from analogue to digital ones.
If you're a provider of hardware you can test your equipment at our Digital Services Test Lab.
Leave us a message after the tone...
To help you better understand what steps you need to take and when to upgrade to digital phone lines, you can sign up to get personalised updates and information from our Call Waiting List
Frequently asked questions
Industry fact sheets
We've produced these fact sheets after talking with industry about how moving to All IP (Digital Phone Lines) will affect them. They provide helpful information and links to the websites of the industry bodies and key stakeholders where you can find more information. They aren't definitive and haven't been endorsed by all of the suppliers in these industries.
Alarm Industry
Energy Industry
Lift Industry
Telecare Industry
Water Industry
Resources
Industry slides
Switching off copper locations list
WLR withdrawal newsletter
All-IP FAQs
Contact us
Getting ready for digital phone lines


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