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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fisty McB" data-source="post: 1158503" data-attributes="member: 389824">(TL;DR at the bottom)The major national landline phone network is under a business group called Openreach, which is an arm of British Telecom, which serves all of the UK (except for the city & surrounds of Kingston-upon-Hull for historical reasons).At present, you can no longer get a new traditional "analogue" phone landline (POTS) in the UK via Openreach except under some very specific circumstances. All new voice traffic otherwise has to be delivered by VoIP, this is set up either via your ISP or you can do so via a third-party should you wish to do so.31 December 2025 is the intended shut-down date for the analogue POTS network on Openreach - this includes landlines that have no current broadband service but do have an analogue phoneline.Note that the above date (31/12/25) only applies to shutting down the analogue phone service - it does not, contrary to what some others having been saying, mean that all copper landline services are being withdrawn. If from January 2026 the only option at the time for Openreach to connect you with an internet service is via a copper pair (either ADSL2+ or VDSL2) they will continue to do so until they are able to upgrade you to a Fibre-To-The-Premises (FTTP) line. It's just that an analogue telephone will no longer work with it in its current form - it'll have to be transferred to VoIP. There's no firm date for Openreach to shut down its copper pair network, if I was to guess I'd say it'll be around 2030, sooner rather than later.The long term intention from Openreach is that almost all premises currently served by copper pair landlines will be served by a fibre FTTP line - the exceptions will be those premises that would be too costly to serve under the current Universal Service Obligation's spending limits per premises, they will either have to stump up the money to connect to the network (partly subsidised by the maximum cost of the USO subsidy) or have to use other means to connect to the internet. Once this conversion from copper pair to FTTP is complete, Openreach are expected to shut down most of their phone exchanges in the UK as they'll be redundant at this point, with somewhere in the region of 100-500 being retained AFAIK from over 4000 - some of the exchange areas that already have high FTTP availability already no longer sell copper connections (they are given the label "stop sell") to most customers served by them.The biggest landline network outside of Openreach is Virgin Media's cable network. AFAIK their "landline" phone service is now being provided as VoIP through their DOCSIS cable router where their HFC network exists, and via a similar method in areas where they now either run fibre to the premises (using a system called Radio Frequency over Glass or RFoG, or using the alt-net Nexfibre's growing network where they provide internet & a streaming service over it similar to Sky Stream - though unlike Sky Stream, Virgin Media will limit you to using either their own or Nexfibre's networks only).For those premises that may never get an FTTP connection, other methods will need to be looked at, ranging from some current models like Fixed Wireless Networks or the use of 4G/5G mobile networks (where available), to the use of satellite broadband, either geostationary or LEO like Starlink.In terms of Gigabit & FTTP availability in the UK, from thinkbroadband.com (Jan 2024 figures)...UK Total - 80.8% with at least gigabit availability, 62.5% able to obtain a gigabit connection via FTTP.England - 81.7% & 62.1% respectivelyScotland - 73.5% & 58.7% respectivelyWales - 69.0% & 61.3% respectivelyNorthern Ireland - 94.9% & 94.3% respectivelyTL;DR - analogue phone network is being shut down in the UK on a provisional date of 31st Dec 2025, and you can no longer get such a new analogue phone service ordered - however you can get a new copper pair ordered in some places for internet service, it's just the line won't have a dial tone if you plug it in to the phone socket in the wall.</blockquote>

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