Liverpool leads final push to digital switchover

Liverpool has moved furthest among ten major UK urban areas in migrating homes and businesses away from legacy analogue phone services, with less than five months remaining before the Public Switched Telephone Network is withdrawn at the end of January 2027.

New data from Openreach shows 6.35% of legacy lines remain to be migrated in Liverpool and its surrounding area, putting the city ahead of Manchester at 7.35%, Sheffield at 7.55%, Cardiff at 8.35%, and Leeds at 8.62%.

Progress is less advanced elsewhere. London has 12.92% of legacy lines still to migrate, Glasgow has 10.60%, while Birmingham, Bristol, and Edinburgh each have around 9% remaining.

Across the ten cities and their surrounding areas, around 90% of legacy services have already moved to digital alternatives. More than six million lines have been migrated over the past five years, leaving approximately 600,000 within those urban areas still to be dealt with before the shutdown.

The remaining connections are increasingly likely to include services that are harder to identify and replace than an ordinary voice line. Businesses can still have payment terminals, lift alarms, security systems, door-entry equipment, telemetry, and building-management technology connected to the analogue network even where their main telephone service has already been upgraded.

James Lilley, director of All-IP at Openreach, said: “But with more than 600,000 lines still to migrate, there’s no room for complacency.”

The January deadline is the culmination of a multi-year transition away from the ageing PSTN and towards internet-based voice and connectivity. Openreach has progressively restricted legacy services and moved exchanges towards digital alternatives, but responsibility for identifying affected equipment is shared across communications providers, businesses, building operators, technology suppliers, and end users.

For companies, the risk is increasingly less about whether employees can make an ordinary telephone call and more about overlooked dependencies elsewhere in the estate. A lift installed years ago may still use an analogue emergency line; an alarm panel can depend on legacy signalling; a payment or entry system may have been commissioned separately from the organisation’s main communications contract.

Those systems are often managed by different suppliers and budget owners. A facilities team may oversee lifts and building controls, security may operate alarms and access systems, finance may manage payment terminals, and IT may control the core network. The final stage of migration consequently becomes an asset-discovery and coordination exercise rather than a straightforward telecoms upgrade.

The city figures also show how national progress can disguise local variation. Liverpool’s residual share is less than half London’s, while several large cities still have roughly one in ten legacy lines in service. Areas with larger property estates, older buildings, more complex commercial premises, or fragmented service ownership can require greater coordination as the deadline approaches.

Nationwide, Openreach estimates that around 1.5 million lines are still operating on the old copper-based network, including approximately 350,000 business premises. That national figure provides the broader backdrop to the city-level data rather than a new estimate created by the September release.

The operational consequences of leaving a dependency undiscovered until the final weeks can be disproportionate to the cost of the individual line. A failed alarm connection can affect building access or insurance arrangements, while a non-functioning lift emergency line or payment terminal can interrupt customer service and require urgent engineering work.

Migration also needs testing rather than simple substitution. Equipment designed around analogue signalling may not behave identically when connected through digital adapters or newer IP services. Suppliers may need to replace devices, install resilient connectivity, or redesign how emergency communications operate during power or broadband failures.

Legacy pricing is also increasing. Openreach says the basic rental price for Wholesale Line Rental services will rise by a further 40% from 1 October, leaving the cost roughly double 2025 rates and adding another incentive to migrate remaining services.

The January 2027 date creates a fixed endpoint for a programme that many organisations have treated as a telecoms project but increasingly resembles a wider operational-resilience exercise. Businesses with multiple sites face the additional task of confirming migration status across property portfolios rather than assuming one successful upgrade covers the whole organisation.

With most straightforward lines already converted, the remaining months are likely to be dominated by more complex equipment and premises requiring supplier coordination, testing, or replacement. Liverpool’s position shows how far the transition has progressed, but the national shutdown will ultimately depend on resolving those harder residual cases before the analogue network is withdrawn.