Businesses and Services
Getting ready for digital phone lines

For businesses and organisations who use phone lines to provide services

Here you’ll find out about the programme and how it will affect you, your business and your clients. You may have also heard this referred to as All IP.

How does this affect my business or organisation that uses the analogue phone network to provide services to customers?

It’s likely that this change will affect anything that currently plugs into the existing analogue telephone wall sockets. This includes any equipment that you may provide to clients and customers or equipment they purchase to utilise the services you offer.

From now until the end of 31 January 2027, service providers like Sky, TalkTalk, BT and Vodafone will need to contact their customers and make them aware that most people will need to move their existing products and services that use the analogue phone network, from the wall socket, to the router, If the router has an analogue port on-board. This is because once a service provider migrates their customers from the current setup, to a digital phone line, the master wall socket will only provide access to the internet and not the more traditional voice calls that currently use a landline. Extensions will cease to work.

In practice, once a customer has been moved to a digital phone line anything else plugged into the telephone wall socket may stop working, or need additional equipment to be purchased and plugged in to enable it to work.

Special Services Industry fact sheets

We've produced these fact sheets after talking with industry about how moving to All IP (Digital Phone Lines) will affect them. They provide helpful information and links to the websites of the industry bodies and key stakeholders where you can find more information. They aren't definitive and haven't been endorsed by all of the suppliers in these industries.

Alarm Industry fact sheet

Energy Industry fact sheet

Lift Industry fact sheet

Telecare Industry fact sheet

Water Industry fact sheet

What should I do now?

Now would be a great time to take an inventory of what you use in your offices and which products and services you provide to your clients and customers and check to see if they’ll work, when lines migrate from analogue to digital ones.

If you're a provider of hardware you can test your equipment at our Digital Services Test Lab.

Find out more about our Test Lab