The Great British Switch Off: What it is and what it means for you

The Great British Switch Off: What it is and what it means for you

If you follow broadband or telecoms industry news, you may have heard about the upcoming withdrawal of copper telephony services.

From 2025, the copper services that deliver phone calls to and from your home will be switched off. And starting much sooner than that, those services will begin to be withdrawn from sale from telephone exchanges up and down the country.

So, what might that mean for you?

Will my phone keep working?

If you’re already a Zen customer, your landline phone will continue to work as normal for some time yet. That means there’s no need to rush to replace your current setup.

But you might find that, over the next couple of years, if you’re looking for a new phone service it might be delivered in a different way.

Instead of calls being routed over those copper cables to your master socket at home, in the future it’s likely that your phone will plug directly into your router and phone calls will be routed digitally over your broadband connection.

If you’re an existing Zen customer, when the time comes, we’ll help you get switched over smoothly so like we’ve already said, there’s no reason to panic just yet.

What about my broadband. Will that go away?

Many users are now taking advantage of full fibre broadband connections. These types of connection completely bypass the old copper network, running a fibre cable all the way to the home. They’re faster and more reliable, and more and more people will switch to this type of broadband over the next couple of years.

However, if you’re still using copper to connect, you’ll still be able to use your broadband for a good while yet.

Traditional ‘all copper’ connections will be withdrawn from sale but if you’re still using ADSL broadband (that’s the technology behind our ‘fast’ broadband packages) your connection should continue to work. Likewise, Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC), the technology used in our ‘Superfast’ connections, will also still work.

However, any new connections will need to use a new service called SOGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access), which is essentially the same as an FTTC connection but without the phone part, or full fibre.

If you want to keep using your landline phone after 2025 though, you’ll need to use a new digital voice service. We’ll have more information on this in a future blog so keep an eye out for that.

What do I need to do now?

The short answer is probably nothing, but that depends on when your broadband contract is due for renewal.

If your contract runs out in the next few months, for example, it might be worth taking the opportunity to look at what type of connectivity you need for the long term. So if you’re still using ADSL for example, you may want to consider a full fibre upgrade at that stage.

If you have another year or so left on your contract though, there’s no need to rush into any upgrades just yet. We'll make sure that we give our customers plenty of notice if a change to their service is required, so the message here is very much 'keep calm and carry on'.

For more on our broadband packages, visit www.zen.co.uk/broadband