Care alarm and the digital switchover: what to check

A care alarm is the pendant round somebody's neck, or the box by the front door, that calls a monitoring centre when a person falls or feels unwell. In most UK homes it was built to make that call over the copper telephone line, and the copper telephone line is being switched off. If the alarm in your house is one of the older ones, it wants checking before your phone provider moves you across rather than after, and the check is not one your broadband company can do for you.

What is actually being switched off?

The public switched telephone network, the copper platform that has carried UK phone calls for decades. It is being retired rather than upgraded, and Openreach has the retirement date at 31 January 2027. After that there is no analogue phone line to dial out on, anywhere.

Your home phone is the visible part of that change, and our guide to the phone that plugs into the router covers what happens to the handset and the number. The alarm is the part that gets forgotten, because it lives in a different conversation with a different company, and nobody owns the join.

Will your care alarm still work?

Many care alarms will, some will not, and which one you have depends on the model and the monitoring centre rather than on your broadband. Alarms sold in the last few years are generally built for a digital line or for a mobile signal. Older units contain an analogue dialler, which sends the alert as a burst of tones down the copper pair, and those tones do not always survive the trip over a digital connection intact.

The failure is nastier than a phone that will not ring, and the reason matters. An alarm that has gone quiet looks exactly like an alarm that has nothing to report. Nobody finds out it stopped working until the day somebody presses it, which is the worst possible day to find out.

What your provider has to do before it moves you

Under the government's public switched telephone network charter, network operators have committed not to migrate a known telecare customer to a digital line unless the customer, the phone company or the telecare company has confirmed there is a compatible and working telecare solution in place. That is a real protection, and concern about telecare users is a large part of why the migration has been slowed more than once.

One word in there is doing all the work, though: known. The commitment only reaches households the industry knows about. A council scheme usually shares that list. An alarm bought privately, or inherited with the house, or set up years ago by a relative who has since moved away, may never have been recorded anywhere your phone provider can see. Those households get migrated like any other, on the ordinary timetable, with no extra check at all.

Which makes the phone call to your provider the most useful ten minutes in this guide. You are not asking for a favour, you are putting yourself on the list the protection runs off.

Who actually knows whether your alarm is digital ready?

Not your broadband provider. They can see the line and the router, and they cannot see a device they did not sell into a monitoring centre they have no contract with. Asking them is how people end up reassured about the wrong thing.

Three organisations hold the real answer between them:

• Whoever supplies the alarm. Usually the council telecare team or a housing association, sometimes a private company, occasionally a charity scheme. They know the model and whether it has been tested digitally.
• The monitoring centre that receives the call. Compatibility works at both ends, and a digital ready unit talking to an old receiver is still a problem.
• Your phone provider. Not for the alarm itself, but for recording that the household has one, and for what they can offer on power.

What happens in a power cut

Less than used to. The old line powered itself from the exchange, which is why a care alarm carried on dialling through a blackout. A digital line runs on your router, and your router runs on the mains, so when the electricity goes the connection goes with it.

Ofcom's rules recognise the gap. Its guidance on access to emergency organisations during a power cut expects providers to have at least one solution that keeps the emergency services reachable for a minimum of one hour, offered free to customers who depend on their landline to call for help. In practice that means a battery backup unit for the router. Our guide to telling a fault from an outage covers what else drops out at the same moment.

One hour is a floor rather than a promise. For a household with a care alarm in it, treat that hour as the start of the conversation rather than the end. Most alarm base units hold their own battery, so the useful question is not whether the alarm has power but whether the router beside it does. If you are somewhere power cuts run long and the mobile signal is thin, say both of those things to your provider and ask what else they can do.

What to do now

• Find the base unit and write down the model. It is the box the pendant talks to, usually near the phone socket. The name is on the underside or the back.
• Ring the alarm supplier and ask one question. Has this model been tested on a digital phone line, and does the monitoring centre still accept it? Get a yes, a no, or a date.
• Tell your phone provider there is a telecare device in the house. This is the step that puts you inside the charter commitment. Ask for it in writing.
• Ask what happens to the router when the power goes. A specific product, not a reassurance.
• Test the alarm afterwards. Monitoring centres expect test presses and would far rather have one than not. Do it once the migration is done, not only before.

What this does not fix

Two gaps are left over, and neither has a tidy answer.

The first is the households nobody has on a list. Every protection here runs off somebody knowing the alarm exists, and the people least likely to be on a register are often the ones living alone with an old unit a family member set up. If that describes a relative rather than you, the phone call is yours to make.

The second is that moving to a mobile based alarm, which several suppliers now push as the clean answer, swaps a dependency on the mains for a dependency on signal. That is a better trade in most homes and a worse one in a few. Check the signal where the base unit actually sits, not at the front door. If an older person's whole setup is due a rethink, our guide to what an older household needs goes through the rest of it, and the availability checker shows which networks reach your street, since that is decided address by address rather than town by town.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know if my care alarm is analogue?

You usually cannot tell by looking, because the case did not change when the insides did. The reliable answer comes from whoever supplies the alarm and monitors it, which is normally your council telecare team, a housing association or a private alarm company. Ring them, give them the model name on the base unit, and ask directly whether it has been tested on a digital line. A shrug is an answer too: if nobody will confirm it works, treat it as an alarm that needs replacing.

Do I have to pay for a digital care alarm?

It depends who supplies the alarm rather than on any single rule. Council and housing association telecare schemes have generally been upgrading equipment as part of the switchover, often at no extra cost to the household, though the weekly monitoring charge usually continues. An alarm bought privately is yours, so replacing it is normally your cost. Ask the supplier what the upgrade path is before you buy anything new, because a unit sold as digital ready still has to work with the monitoring centre at the other end.

Will the alarm still work in a power cut?

Only for as long as the alarm battery and your router last, which is a real change from the old arrangement. A copper line drew power from the exchange, so a care alarm kept dialling when the lights went out. A digital line depends on your router and the mains. Most alarm base units hold their own backup battery, but that does not help if the router beside it is dead, so the router needs backup power too. Ask your phone provider what they offer for a household with a care alarm in it.

Can I stop my provider switching me over?

Not permanently, because the old network is being retired rather than offered as a choice. What you can do is make sure your provider has you recorded as a household with a telecare device, which puts you on a slower and more careful path rather than an automatic one. That record is the thing that triggers the extra checks, and it does not appear on its own. Say it on the phone, then ask them to confirm it in writing.

Does switching to an altnet change any of this?

The switch-off timetable is the same whoever you buy from, because it is the copper network underneath that is closing rather than any one provider. What does change is who you are asking. A smaller network runs its own phone service and its own vulnerability process, so the questions about telecare compatibility and power cut backup need putting to them directly before you order, not assumed from what your old provider did.