10 October 2026
Your landline is being switched off in January 2027. Here's what happens to your number.
The analogue phone network retires on 31 January 2027. Your number survives it — what changes is how the call reaches you, and businesses have one less safety net than homes do.
£9.99 a monthUp to 300 minutes a month to a UK mobile included, then 5p a minute.
Start with the part people worry about most: you do not lose your number. The analogue telephone network is being retired, not the numbering system. Every number on it is being moved onto a digital service, and your right to keep that number and take it elsewhere is unchanged. What changes is how the call gets to you.
The date is 31 January 2027. It was originally the end of 2025 and was pushed back once; Openreach have since said publicly that there is no further extension and the date is fixed. There will not be a single moment when every phone goes dead — exchanges are being migrated area by area through 2026, and anyone still on an old line at the end is moved to whatever their provider has set as the default.
What replaces it is voice over your broadband connection. In most homes the handset you already own still works; it plugs into the back of the router instead of the socket on the wall. Alongside the consumer switch, the wholesale products businesses buy — WLR, and ISDN lines of the kind that sit behind an office phone system — are being withdrawn on the same timetable.
Plenty of people have not moved yet. Openreach reported around 1.5 million UK lines still on the old network in late July 2026, down from about 1.9 million a month earlier, and roughly 350,000 of those were business premises. Businesses are over-represented in that backlog, which matters because of the next paragraph.
There is a fallback being piloted for people whose broadband fails — a voice-only emergency service, trialled in Salisbury and Mildenhall — and it is for residential single lines. Business lines are not covered by it. If your trade counts on the phone and your broadband goes down, the digital replacement goes down with it, and there is no safety net underneath a business line.
So the practical checklist is short. Find out from your provider when your exchange migrates rather than waiting to be told. Tell them about anything else that quietly uses the phone line — a care alarm, a lift phone, a card machine, an alarm panel — because those are what actually break. And decide what you want on the other side, rather than accepting the default your provider picks for you.
That last one is the part worth thinking about, because being forced to change is also permission to change properly. The default answer puts a handset on a router at a fixed address, which is the same arrangement you had, with a new dependency on your broadband. The other answer is to stop having a phone at a place at all: keep the number, and have it ring the phone in your pocket. That is what we do — the number lives on a carrier's network, and when someone dials it we place an ordinary call to your mobile. No router, no handset, no app, and nothing to go down when the broadband does. It is £9.99 a month. Up to 300 minutes a month to a UK mobile included, then 5p a minute.
Two honest things about that. Emergency calls are the question everyone asks about the switch-off, and the answer here is that we do not carry them: our numbers receive calls, they do not make them, and your mobile dials 999 exactly as it always has, over the mobile network, with no broadband involved. And transfers are not instant — moving an existing number takes a few weeks, so if you want yours moved before January it is a November job, not a January one.
If you are transferring a number out of a provider you are also leaving, the order matters more than anything else: start the transfer first and cancel afterwards. Cancel the line first and the number goes back into your old provider's pool, and at that point nobody can get it back for you.