10 October 2026
Copper is going. What happens to your landline number?
Chorus is retiring copper in fibre areas and nationwide by 2028. Your number is not what is being retired — but the phone on the wall is, and a fibre landline has a weakness the old one didn't.
NZ$24.99 a monthUp to 120 minutes a month to a New Zealand mobile included, then 20c a minute.
If you have had a letter about copper being withdrawn at your address, the first thing worth knowing is what is actually being taken away. It is the copper pair running to your building. It is not your phone number. Numbers are not being retired, and your right to keep yours and move it to another provider is not affected by any of this.
Chorus has been withdrawing copper in fibre areas since 2021 and has said it intends to finish in those areas by the end of 2026, with the whole network gone by 2028 — a date it brought forward from 2030 as demand fell away. By the June 2026 quarter, fibre uptake across its footprint had reached about 76 percent, and copper disconnections were outpacing new fibre connections.
You are protected by rules while this happens. The Commerce Commission's Copper Withdrawal Code, in force since March 2021 and updated in 2024, requires that you are given advance notice — in practice at least six months — that you are told what your options are, and that copper is not removed from an address unless there is a suitable alternative available there. If a letter has arrived, the clock it starts is a long one. You are not about to be cut off next week.
What changes is the phone itself. A landline delivered over fibre is not a line any more; it is a service running over your internet connection, usually with the handset plugged into the router. That works well, with one difference from the copper it replaces that nobody mentions in the letter: the old line drew power from the exchange and kept working in a power cut. A fibre or broadband landline needs mains power at your end, so unless you have a battery backup, a power cut takes the phone with it. In a country that gets storms, that is not a small detail.
There is a third option besides fibre landline and giving up the number, and it is the one we built. Keep a local number — an 09, 07, 06, 04 or 03, whichever matches where your customers think you are — and have it ring your mobile instead of a handset at an address. The number sits on a carrier's network rather than on anything running into your building, so there is no router in the path, no fibre appointment, and nothing to go down when the power does. It is NZ$24.99 a month. Up to 120 minutes a month to a New Zealand mobile included, then 20c a minute.
Two honest notes. We receive calls, we do not make them, so 111 is dialled from your mobile over the mobile network exactly as it is today — which, given the power-cut problem above, is the more dependable of the two routes anyway. And moving an existing number to us takes a few weeks rather than minutes, so if a withdrawal notice has landed, start it when the letter arrives rather than when the deadline does.
One last thing worth doing today, whatever you choose: work out what else in the building quietly uses that line. Monitored alarms, lift phones, EFTPOS terminals and medical alarms are the ones that catch people, because they keep working right up until the day the copper goes and then fail silently. The phone you will notice. Those you will not.