Nearly half of landline users are unsure what the switch-off means
Nearly half the people who still have a landline do not know what the analogue switch-off asks of them. A OnePoll survey of 2,000 UK adults with a home phone, commissioned by the London provider Community Fibre, found 45% do not fully understand what they need to do before the old network goes off. It was reported by ISPreview and carried across the regional press this morning.
The change itself is not complicated. The old copper phone network is being retired and calls are moving over your broadband connection instead. In most houses the provider arranges it, and the only visible difference is the phone plugging into the back of the router rather than the socket on the skirting board. Both tellings put the deadline at January 2027.
Where people are stuck is knowing whether any of it is their job. Of those who said they were not confident, 47% told the survey they had not seen enough information about the change, and 33% were confused about what action was actually required.
The figure worth pausing on is a different one. Before taking the survey, 48% did not know the switch-off could affect anything in the house other than the telephone. It can. Telecare alarms and pendants that dial an emergency response centre, and some older home security systems, run on the same line, and those are the devices that do not always move across on their own. If someone in your household relies on one, the useful call is to whoever supplies the alarm rather than to your phone company. Our guide to broadband for older households covers what to ask.
The deadline is softer than the headline suggests. ISPreview reports that 31 January 2027 is a firm date for business lines, that consumer lines will not be cut off on the same day, that a temporary Emergency Voice Access fallback exists for anyone who has not moved by then, and that the real end point is 2030, when older exchanges start being retired at scale. It also makes the point that plenty of people answering a survey like this have already been switched without noticing. Openreach counted around 1.5 million lines still on legacy copper at the end of July 2026, down from about 1.9 million the month before.
One caution about the survey. It was paid for by a company that sells the thing it says people need, so the advice attached to it, that you should shop around rather than take the first offer from your current provider, is coming from an interested party even where it happens to be sensible. The same campaign says you keep your existing number and the incoming provider handles the switch. If you are weighing that up, the availability checker shows which networks have actually built on your street, and our guide to broadband without a landline is worth reading first. Some households going through this decide they do not want a home phone at all.