Walk into any ordinary-looking building marked ‘Telephone Exchange’, and you’ll see how the world talks. Inside, the walls are crammed with rows of small plastic blocks. On one side, cables go in connecting homes and businesses to the network; on the other, cables connect everyone to the rest of the world.
Since 1891, this impenetrable jungle of messy copper cables has allowed people to dial a unique number to connect to anyone anywhere in the world, without the need for a human operator. The cables are the veins of Britain’s Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), an analogue jumble connecting any landline to a sprawling mesh of wires, undersea cables and satellites, cabinets and street poles. And in three years’ time, most of these lines will go silent.
Thousands of Openreach engineers are working to replace Britain’s copper telephone network and kill the landline for good. Their deadline? December 31, 2025. From that moment, landlines for any home or business in Britain will only continue to work if they are hooked up to the internet.
“The copper network is still the bread and butter of the UK right now. It served us well during the pandemic, we kept everyone connected on that network,” says James Lilley, director of managed customer migrations at Openreach. “It’s not falling over, but it takes more time and effort to keep it at that standard.” And that effort is quickly becoming too much to bear. With the necessary hardware no longer being manufactured and the skills needed to maintain it no longer being taught, the copper network is running out of time.
When the changeover is complete, it will mark the end of the dominance of landline phone numbers: many will become disused, others forgotten. Older handsets will stop working if they can’t connect to digital exchanges and become relics just like the rotary phone; and some phones will no longer use tone dialing, the musical sound that since the 1960s accompanied the pressing of keys to punch in a phone number.
Across the UK, Openreach looks after 192 million kilometres of cables, 110,000 green cabinets, and 4.9 million telephone poles and junction boxes. Replacing copper with fibre will not make the network any smaller, but Openreach hopes it will make it more cost-effective in the long run. That’s after an upfront cost of £12 billion to roll out 1Gbps fibre to the premises (FTTP) to 20 million premises across the country. Openreach plans to reach 25 million by the end of 2026, and has already switched over 5.5 million. To do this, engineers have to go to each exchange, unhook the copper cables and replace them with fibre until they reach 75 per cent coverage. Once they do, they trigger a ‘stop sell’, which means they stop selling products on the copper platform and herd people towards an upgrade to FTTP instead.
On October 5, the first real big tranche of exchanges will hit the stop-sell barrier – around 1.4 million customers will be forced to swap for the first time when they switch providers or ask for an upgrade to their network. It’s the first time this widespread switchover will happen outside of Openreach’s trial sites in Salisbury and Mildenhall.
The challenge, Lilley says, is the fact that engineers have to manage the churn of people upgrading their services while also servicing people who are on the old analogue telephone network. “We don’t want to run two networks in parallel, we don’t want to build the new stuff, which is really reliable and then to run an ageing copper network next to it.” That’s why people will be forcibly pushed on to the new system when a national stop-sell comes into effect from September 2023, affecting 14 million customers who still rely on the PSTN network.
Salisbury was the first place in the UK to trial a total changeover to VoIP in 2020, and over 95 per cent of its 20,000 premises are now using VoIP. It was the perfect case study, says Lilley, because it was a major engineering challenge: OpenReach had to figure out how to connect the centre of the city without leaving unsightly cables near the iconic cathedral.
Instead of digging up the stone floor of the cathedral, the 60 engineers on the ground set up tech that would camouflage itself amongst the historical architecture. They were the first in the world to use new super small connectorised block terminals (CBTs) that discreetly connect fibre cables to people’s homes. The slimline units, which are roughly the size of a mobile phone, are designed to connect eight premises in one go, without having to erect new poles. More than 200 have been deployed across the city centre, serving around 1,500 homes and businesses. Engineers also used Ground Penetrating Radar, which let them see and map out a clear route for new cables without any drilling; and retractable cables, for long areas of terraced houses and shop fronts, to avoid digging.
They also went door to door, speaking to people who did not have broadband and set them up, plugging their phones into their routers. By 2022, all of the city will have had to switch over to a full-fibre network.
The Suffolk market town of Mildenhall was next: stop-sell was triggered on May 4. It was chosen because it’s typical of others in the UK in terms of both geography and the range of communication providers offering services. The plan was a little different from Salisbury — instead of migrating customers to fibre services, engineers would focus on migrating customers from legacy copper services to replacement copper services that will support the delivery of telephone services over broadband. So far, the trial is going well. It felt very different from Salisbury, says Lilley, because people weren’t getting a shiny new bit of kit. “It’s more of a silent migration,” he explains. “All you might be doing is changing where you plug your phone.”
There are bits of the copper network that have been around for so long that they are clunky, unreliable and fragile. The capacity of those wires, which were never really built with the internet in mind, is limited and only allows so much data to be carried over a distance. Repairs and upgrades can involve digging up buried cables to find a fault, which can be costly. Fibre optic cables, on the other hand, have more capacity than we know what to do with. Digital privacy non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation calls this a “speed chasm” between legacy networks and fibre networks and claims that although updating the existing copper infrastructure is cheaper, the speed that most households need for internet connectivity — which exceeded 25 mbps on download in 2020 — means that copper is no longer fit for purpose.
The work is long-overdue. The UK is lagging behind the rest of the world for broadband connectivity, despite increasing its fibre connections by more than 50 per cent in 2020. According to OECD data, Spain, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden are among the countries with the best connectivity, with over 70 per cent of coverage.
In the last decade or so, the mix of different networks has created a peculiar tech jumble in the UK, explains Dean Bubley, founder of tech consulting firm Disruptive Wireless. Someone picking up a receiver that is connected to a PSTN network, and hooked up to an exchange, is going through many different gateways, boxes, segways and switches that mean their connection might be travelling in and out of the internet several times by the time their voice reaches the other end. “Some of those will be IP and they will translate back and forth between conventional telephony to IP at those gateway points,” Bubley says. “That is horribly inefficient and adds sound deterioration as well.”
Some of that infrastructure is pointless. The copper network’s legacy is thousands of phone numbers that are foisted on customers who are only interested in broadband, and are left unused. Since 2000, four million homes have disconnected their landline altogether, according to research from price comparison firm Uswitch. Of the 80 per cent of homes that do still have a landline, a quarter (26 per cent) don’t have a handset plugged into the wall. Thirty-five per cent of people said the only reason they have a landline number is because they were required for a broadband connection. People have claimed they receive more calls from scammers on their landlines than they do from their loved ones.
During the national lockdowns, when people were confined to their homes, there was a surge of up to 50 per cent in the number of phone calls being made over mobile, and 30 per cent on landline calls in the UK, Germany and Spain. The risk of overloading the network led to calls for industry action to improve voice services to handle a rise in communications and stop issues such as dropped calls and outages.
This new system will mean the opposite: people who only want voice services will now have to buy broadband and use it through there, instead. And for many elderly and vulnerable people, landlines are a lifeline, particularly if they don’t have internet or live in a rural area with poor connectivity.
Joel Lewis, policy manager at Age UK, says there are a million people in the UK that don’t have an internet connection, and could end up very confused. “The fact that it's happening in different regions, different areas at different times means that we need to target local efforts to support the local population to make the switchover,” he says.
The big danger in the crossover is that devices that rely on analogue phone connections to work – like care and security systems – may cease to function without anyone noticing. There are many edge case systems that rely on the telephone network, widely considered to be more reliable than the grid, to operate. Alarm buttons for elderly residents’ assistance, emergency phones in elevators, the phones at railway crossings, building intercoms, traffic lights and motorway signals are just a few such systems that risk being forgotten about or overlooked. And you don’t want to forget a traffic light.
The 2023 national stop-sell deadline is actually the easy bit, says Lilley. It’s the peripheral things that use PSTN that might slow things down. “A lot of the industry focus and collaboration is around making sure that those edge cases are understood and moved in time. I'm not I'm not so worried about the big volumes of residential customers, I think that will all work fine,” Lilley says. If they miss the deadline, it’ll be because they can’t leave anyone, or anything, behind.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
