The Landline Switch Off Comes With a Broadband Pause. The Protocol Promised 30 Days First.

“This letter serves as confirmation that the January 2027 deadline will not be moved.” Openreach put that sentence in an urgent letter to communications providers in the last week of October, and Mobile Europe reported it on 30 October. The old public switched telephone network, the PSTN, is retired on 31 January 2027. Openreach’s own count, published the same week, put about a million copper-based lines still on it, including 300,000 in business premises, down from about 1.5 million at the end of July. The lines that remain are, in the words of James Lilley at Openreach, the complex connections. The straightforward migrations, he said, have largely been completed.

For a household, the landline switch off is usually a small change. The phone plugs into the back of a broadband router instead of the socket in the wall, the number stays the same, and BT calls the result Digital Voice. The difficulty is not the plug. It’s the households that providers can’t reach, or can’t identify as needing help, and the measures now being used to make them respond.

BT has introduced a temporary pause of broadband service for a small group of customers who, in the company’s account, had failed to respond to communications about the switchover for around two years. The customers affected were reportedly given five days’ notice that their broadband would be temporarily paused, according to reporting in the English Chronicle on 3 October, and BT says more than 80% of those affected then took the steps needed to proceed with the migration. A BT spokesperson defended the measure in the same terms to Brum Daily: “The temporary broadband pause we have introduced for this small minority is intended to help prevent a complete loss of service when the old, analogue network is retired.” The pause is not a disconnection, and BT stresses that it is limited. It’s a lever, applied to the connection a household uses for everything else, in order to get an answer about the phone line.

There is a written procedure for people who do not answer, and it doesn’t start with a pause. In March 2026 the government secured industry agreement to a set of charters and two Final Engagement Protocols for customers who do not respond to repeated contact. Baroness Lloyd of Effra, the telecoms minister, told Parliament’s Science, Innovation and Technology Committee that the protocols commit providers to contact customers at least three times, using at least two suitable channels, in clear and accessible language. Providers must allow a minimum response period of 30 days. Additional time, communications and safeguards apply for customers who need extra support. The protocol for communication providers, as published, goes further for customers identified as vulnerable: notice by letter and electronically, at least 60 days before cessation, with calls to the customer and any third-party contact at least three times in that period, and notification of the department and Ofcom. A provider that follows it may cease a service only after that process has run, and only silence at the end of it leads to cessation. Nothing in the minister’s account of the protocols mentions pausing a customer’s broadband after five days to prompt a reply.

Whether the pause lands on the right people depends on records being right, and the record on that point is uncomfortable. In February 2026 Ofcom opened a compliance remediation process over BT’s outbound calling campaign for the migration, after finding that its processes “were not sufficiently robust and could have placed telecare users at risk”. The regulator’s account, published on 14 September, lists the potential for agent error when checking a customer’s telecare status before migration, delays or inconsistencies in reconnecting telecare customers who lose service, and possible gaps in BT’s published vulnerability policy. BT has since added system alerts, agent training, post-migration checks and a revised vulnerability policy, and Ofcom says the changes sufficiently address the concerns and secure meaningful additional protections. Ofcom also states that BT’s agreement to make the improvements does not constitute a finding of non-compliance, and that it has made no determination on whether BT contravened any requirement. The final systems and policy changes are due by the end of November, and Ofcom says it will keep monitoring.

The people who wrote about the pause letters on BT’s own community forum in September did not sound like people who had ignored every letter. One, who signed herself Sarah, wrote about her 89-year-old father, who had the onset of dementia. “We have complied with all the BT demands and bullying, spent hours on the phone, taken time off work to be at dad’s house…” And then: “Now they have switched off his broadband for 7 days, sent a threatening and bullying email, plus sent a BT bill today to add insult to injury.” Another poster wrote that her own case had stalled through no fault of her own. “Like you were had responded to everything and complied with all the demands but through no fault of our own our case had stalled,” she wrote. She added that the executive office had told her its staff made three or four calls a day to elderly people, or people with elderly relatives, who were on the receiving end of what she called awful emails. “It is bullying and it is threatening and is completely out of order,” she wrote. BT’s public account is that the pause applies to a small minority who have not responded to repeated communications. The forum posts describe something else: households that answered, or tried to, and were still treated as if they had not. The difference between those two accounts is a record-keeping question. It’s the question Ofcom’s remediation was about.

On Facebook, the same pause drew shorter answers. Toni Grant, replying to a UK News Express post on 3 October about BT pausing broadband for customers who refuse to switch, wrote: “No coz I dont want a digital landline. The reason I have a landline is because of lack of mobile signal where I live.” Zackkery Cat answered the same post in one line: “if they are paying for it you must provide it.” The post went up on 3 October, the same day the English Chronicle reported the pause.

Dennis Reed, founder of the campaign group Silver Voices, told Brum Daily he was seeing increasing evidence of pressure tactics. He said he feared that, because targets had to be met, a lot of people would fall through the cracks. Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, told the Register that providers must keep trying to reach people who have not responded. She told Brum Daily that the January deadline “should not mark a hard-and-fast cliff edge”. Providers, she said, should commit to ensuring no older person is cut off for not having switched yet. They aren’t disputing the date. They’re disputing what the date is allowed to do to a person who has not moved. Age UK’s point, in both places, is that older people are overrepresented among those still to move.

The safety record behind the caution is stated plainly in the government’s own Telecare National Action Plan, published in February 2025 by the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. “There have been serious incidents, including a small number of fatalities, where telecare devices have failed to work properly after the switchover,” it says, in cases where telecare users had not been correctly identified or there were technical issues with how devices were connected after migration. About two million people in the UK use telecare, most commonly personal alarm pendants. The plan promised that the government would establish a feasible timeline for phasing out analogue telecare devices and communicate a deadline “in the coming months”. Twenty months later, new guidance for housing providers published in October 2026 reports that around three-quarters of grouped living scheme telecare alarms are still analogue. Around a third of personal alarms are too. The regulator has already enforced once in this territory: Ofcom fined Virgin Media £23.8 million in December 2025 after it disconnected telecare customers during its own digital migration programme.

The network itself has a last resort for the household that still does nothing. Openreach says customers who have failed to transition may be automatically transferred to EVAc, a limited, temporary service designed strictly to maintain access to essential calls, with broadband kept running where technically possible. Its letter to providers describes EVAc as a temporary safeguarding service for basic voice connections. It is not built to support the connectivity needs of a modern business, and its press release calls it significantly more expensive than the digital alternatives. A household without broadband, or that does not want it, has a different route. The government’s guidance says some providers offer an interim, dedicated landline service that lets customers use their current landline as they do today until a digital solution is available or 2030, if that comes sooner. The catch, stated in the same guidance, is that digital landlines need mains electricity and will not work in a power cut without a battery backup. Ofcom requires providers to offer customers who depend on their landline a free backup solution lasting at least an hour, and the 2023 PSTN Charter commits signatories to go beyond that minimum. The exchanges that house the old equipment are themselves closing: the March 2026 ministerial letter notes that Openreach has commenced its Exchange Exit programme, with thousands of exchanges expected to close in the coming years.

Staying on the old line has also become expensive. The final phase of Openreach’s announced rental rises for its wholesale line rental products took effect on 1 October 2026, doubling the 2025 rental price for legacy lines, with further rises in the pipeline from February 2027. Openreach has also offered migration deals, including free or discounted connections for providers upgrading customers. The price signal and the pause are doing the same work from opposite directions: one makes waiting cost more, the other makes not answering cost attention.

Northern Ireland held the fewest of the remaining lines, 32,809. London and the South East accounted for 250,473, and Wales and the Midlands for 233,033.