Discontinuation of the public switch telephone network in the United Kingdom
As in many other countries, the United Kingdom is retiring its part of the global circuit-switched
public switched telephone network
.
[1]
[2]
[3]
British Telecom
, the country's dominant telco, announced its intention to switch off its PSTN infrastructure by December 2025, including both copper baseband
landline telephone
connections and its
ISDN
network.
[2]
Openreach
, the major telecommunications infrastructure provider in the United Kingdom, is also due to retire its
Wholesale Line Rental
service.
[4]
This process has been planned since 2017, and will roll out in a series of phases.
[5]
All providers are expected to implement
Voice over IP
and other IP-based network services to replace copper PSTN and ISDN connections.
[6]
PSTN switch-off
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All major British telcos. including other
Broadband Stakeholder Group
companies such as
Virgin Media
and
Sky UK
that have their own infrastructure, will also cease to support both copper PSTN and fibre ISDN connections.
[7]
[8]
Instead, analog landline telephones will be expected to connect to adaptors on
home routers
, and businesses connecting to the PSTN via ISDN connections will be expected to move to
SIP
connections to the
VoIP
network, a transition that has already been performed by many companies.
Voice telephony will continue to follow the
E.163
and
E.164
standards, as with current mobile telephony, with the interface to end-users remaining the same. Traditional analog telephones will continue to operate via traditional analog phone sockets, but with those phone sockets now terminating at the on-premises router or PBX. No changes will need to be made to the mobile phone networks, which already interconnect via data networking technologies.
Retirement of the copper last-mile access network
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Copper landlines will continue to be used for
ADSL
and
VDSL
Internet access for the time being.
Fibre to the premises
Internet access is planned to be rolled out nationally, allowing the eventual retirement of the entire copper telephone network.
[9]
BT Openreach's copper plant has been reported to have billions of pounds of scrap value, even after accounting for the cost of removal, with over a million tonnes of copper buried under the streets.
[10]
[11]
Full retirement of the copper access network is expected to stretch into the 2030s.
[11]
One problem with the replacement of the copper last mile is the discontinuation of electrical power to devices via the phone network, including critical devices such as health monitors. Work is in progress to address these problems.
[12]
References
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See also
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