{"id":42452,"date":"2021-09-09T14:59:12","date_gmt":"2021-09-09T14:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/?guid=4d6f7594e3348471c1d01a8229e2cc06"},"modified":"2021-09-09T14:59:12","modified_gmt":"2021-09-09T14:59:12","slug":"the-great-telephone-switch-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/the-great-telephone-switch-off\/","title":{"rendered":"The great telephone switch-off"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n Barry Collins<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
21 Sep, 2021<\/span><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

The telephone network that we\u2019ve relied on for decades is coming to an end. The UK\u2019s public switched telephone network (PSTN) is being shut down in 2025, and traditional telephony products will stop being sold in as little as 18 months\u2019 time.<\/p>\n

The closure puts on notice everything from your home landline to the office phone system, from burglar alarms to traffic lights. They\u2019ll all need to be migrated to digital technology within the next few years or they\u2019ll stop working. ISDN lines are another casualty<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve spoken to the person responsible for managing the switch-off and other industry experts to\u00a0find out precisely what effect this will have on businesses \u2013 and why you need to start planning now for the great British switch-off.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s being switched off?<\/h2>\n

Although the switch-off hasn\u2019t been widely publicised yet, there\u2019s already some confusing, contradictory and wrong information being distributed about what\u2019s being switched off, so let\u2019s try and get to the bottom of it.<\/p>\n

By far the most critical pieces of infrastructure to go are the phone lines. By 2025, every phone line in the country will be IP-based, instead of running over the traditional PSTN. That means the landline phone plugged into the wall will be redundant by 2025 (although some communications providers may offer workarounds, which we\u2019ll come to).<\/p>\n

The shutdown won\u2019t only affect phone systems; it\u2019s also going to affect any piece of tech that relies on a traditional phone line, including emergency phones in lifts, panic alarms, information displays, door-entry systems, CCTV and EPOS payment terminals.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a pretty big challenge,\u201d says James Lilley, director of managed customer migrations at Openreach, who is overseeing the switch-off. \u201cThere are all sorts of what we call \u2018economy special services\u2019 that hang off that network,\u201d he adds, referring to the devices fitted with telephone lines mentioned above. \u201cThey\u2019re the ones that probably give us the biggest challenge in terms of migration and moving them over the coming years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hanging up on the landline<\/h2>\n

Before we get onto that compendium of tech that hangs off the PSTN, let\u2019s deal with telephones themselves. For home customers, James Lilley says that the providers currently supplying phone and internet services will deliver solutions to allow customers to keep using their existing handsets.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing most communications providers do now is include analogue converters in their [internet] hubs,\u201d he says. \u201cSo, you can take that same handset, and instead of plugging it into the wall, you plug it in the back of your router. Essentially, that will convert you to digital voice over the router.\u201d Existing telephone numbers will be ported to a new VoIP system.<\/p>\n

Business telephone systems, however, are a great deal more complicated than home landlines, and few companies have much expertise and experience in upgrading and managing them. After all, it\u2019s perfectly likely that many small businesses had a PBX installed a decade or two ago and have barely touched it since. Some telephone systems will still be based on ISDN lines, which are also facing the chop in 2025.<\/p>\n

Research conducted by Zen Internet shows that 72% of businesses are reliant on traditional telephony, more so in large enterprises. Yet the research also found that a third of SMEs were unaware of the future switch-off, with 17% of large businesses still in the dark.<\/p>\n

Alex Bloor, general manager at Andrews & Arnold (A&A), says that the PSTN switch-off is a good opportunity for businesses to take advantage of the benefits that IP telephony brings \u2013 indeed, most of his company\u2019s customers already have. \u201cOur customers are either businesses with phones on desks, in which case they typically want something designed for purpose \u2013 and there are some really great, fairly cheap VoIP handsets<\/a> by companies like Snom,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cOr, we have customers who put one\u00a0of our SIP2SIM cards in a mobile phone,\u201d he adds. SIP2SIM basically allows a customer to insert a SIM card in any mobile phone (not even necessarily a smartphone) and have it work like an office phone that\u2019s tied to your desk. When you call out from the phone, it appears with the firm\u2019s geographical \u201clandline\u201d number.<\/p>\n

Zen Internet\u2019s Jon Perkins says the company has stopped selling traditional telephony products to business customers, and is focusing on helping them prepare for the switch. \u201cWe\u2019re signalling what\u2019s coming and when, and giving them solutions,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd we\u2019re often taking a bit of a margin hit, so we\u2019re investing ahead of time to avoid what could be a much bigger risk. There\u2019s a\u00a0[cost] incentive to move customers off traditional copper-based voice services onto digital.\u201d<\/p>\n

That incentive applies to the company\u2019s customers too, says Perkins, with customers able to buy a chunk of call minutes much more cheaply than traditional phone tariffs. \u201cYou generally save a lot of money [on calls],\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

As for ISDN, that was already a diminishing force in businesses, and the events of the past 18 months have given it a further shove towards obsolescence. Perkins describes his company as \u201cexhibit A\u201d for such a migration, having moved from an ISDN call centre to a hosted VoIP platform when its 200 customer support staff suddenly had to start working from home<\/a>. \u201cLots of other call centres and colleagues in the telecoms industry have shared the same experience,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

ISDN\u2019s diminishing customer base means it will barely be a problem in 2025, but there\u2019s one area where it\u2019s stubbornly clinging to life, and that\u2019s in the \u201cspecials\u201d market such as bus shelters, traffic lights and other utility devices that are going to prove more stubborn to shift.<\/p>\n

The long tail<\/h2>\n

This brings us to those hard-to-budge devices we mentioned earlier: the burglar alarms, lift phones, panic alarms, traffic lights and all those other devices that rely on an old-fashioned phone line to call\u00a0home.<\/p>\n

Openreach\u2019s Lilley admits that this huge swathe of non-telephony devices is going to pose the biggest challenge, but measures are in place to ensure a smooth migration. \u201cWe\u2019ve got people coming into the tent now from a lot of trade bodies, representing a lot of the industries that use this network \u2013 like the alarm industry, the water industry and some of the utilities,\u201d he explains. \u201cThey\u2019re increasingly working with us to make sure that they\u2019re messaging out\u00a0to their suppliers the need to make sure that their equipment is compatible with IP.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lilley admits that \u201cthere will come a point in time where we need to switch this network off and, if customers haven\u2019t migrated, there will be some tough choices to make\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe key thing is when we look at the critical stuff like health pendants, for example\u2026 they\u2019re the ones we really, really need to make sure as an industry that we\u2019re identifying and having the right migration policies and support in place for in the coming years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some industries are better prepared than others. Barry Forsyth owns alarms business InstallSmart and points out that his industry has already migrated many alarm systems to either cellular or IP-based systems. \u201cIf your alarm was fitted by an accredited installer, they should have been proactive and upgraded those systems to a different signalling path,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

However, he acknowledges that there will still be instances where business owners have ignored messages urging them to upgrade, or where alarm fitters have gone out of business. He\u2019s particularly concerned about fire alarms, as there could obviously be life-or-death implications if they\u2019re not upgraded before PSTN is switched off.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Forsyth warns consumers and businesses to be wary of alarm companies using the PSTN switch-off as an excuse to sell an entire new alarm system when only the control box needs replacing. \u201cI can\u2019t think of a product that wouldn\u2019t be upgradable [to cellular or IP signalling],\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

One solution for many products still relying on PSTN is similar to what will happen with domestic phone lines \u2013 an analogue telephone adapter (ATA) will be used to connect them to the digital network. \u201cI\u00a0suspect we\u2019ll see a lot of emergency panic-button pendants hastily plugged into ATAs with weeks to spare until the deadline in 2025, and some will work and some might not,\u201d says A&A\u2019s Alex Bloor.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, there will be some legacy products that haven\u2019t been upgraded when the switch is finally flicked in 2025. \u201cI strongly suspect there will be cases when someone gets trapped in a lift and stuck there all night\u2026 or when an\u00a0old person trips over and presses the button, and nothing happens,\u201d says Bloor.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe may well hear some of these stories, but on the other hand, I wouldn\u2019t use that as a stick to beat up BT with. Ultimately, we all knew that the days of PSTN were numbered when VoIP really started to\u00a0take hold. It\u2019s just one of those things. It\u2019s been a hundred years, for goodness\u2019 sake!<\/a>\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barry Collins<\/p>\n

21 Sep, 2021 <\/p>\n

The telephone network that we\u2019ve relied on for decades is coming to an end. The UK\u2019s public switched telephone network (PSTN) is being shut down in 2025, and traditional telephony products will…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":408,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/408"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42452"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42453,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42452\/revisions\/42453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}