Before you continue
To give you the best possible experience please select your preference.
To give you the best possible experience please select your preference.
Somewhere in your customer base, a stop-sell date is already active — and the customer probably doesn't know it yet. Across multiple markets, incumbent operators are retiring the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), the copper-based infrastructure that has carried voice calls for over a century. For a service provider still running voice traffic through a mix of legacy interconnects, this isn't background noise; it's the same kind of aggregation challenge covered in our guide to global wholesale SIP trunking for service providers, applied under a hard deadline. Handled reactively, each switch-off wave is a support burden. Handled proactively, it's the most predictable acquisition campaign you'll run this year.
BLUF: Copper retirement forces every affected customer to change provider or plan — and the service provider who reaches them first, with a clear migration path, wins the account regardless of who held it before.
Unlike most sales cycles, a switch-off wave comes with a built-in trigger event and a fixed date. The customer has to act. The only open question is who they act with — their existing provider, or a competitor who called first with a working cloud PBX offer.
BLUF: Copper retirement is a global trend, but the timeline, mechanism, and regulator differ by market — treating any single country's deadline as universal will cause you to misjudge urgency elsewhere.
Openreach, regulated by Ofcom, has confirmed that the UK's entire PSTN and Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) product set will be withdrawn by 31 January 2027, after an earlier December 2025 deadline was pushed back to protect vulnerable telecare users. As of early 2026, roughly 2.8 million lines were still active on the PSTN, with more than half a million serving business premises (Openreach). A stop-sell is already in force across most exchange areas, meaning new copper orders are being refused well ahead of the final date.
Sweden's Telia has taken its copper network from a peak of 6 million active subscriptions down to roughly 30,000 remaining lines to terminate, with full closedown completed in 2026 (Telia, presented via BEREC). The Swedish case is instructive precisely because it is further along than most: it shows that industrialized, batch-by-batch migration works at national scale — but also that "closing the network is easy; migration is the hard part," in the operator's own assessment.
In Australia, Telstra's copper retirement is not governed by one national cutover date but proceeds region by region, tied to National Broadband Network (NBN) fibre availability — typically with an 18-month migration window once fibre reaches an area. This regional, rolling-deadline model is common outside Europe and requires a different targeting approach than the UK's single fixed date.
BLUF: The service providers who win the most switch-off business treat each wave as a structured campaign — map, segment, automate — rather than a queue of reactive support tickets.
Cross-reference your customer base against the regulator's or incumbent's published switch-off schedule (Ofcom/Openreach in the UK, NBN Co's rollout regions in Australia, the relevant national operator elsewhere) to identify every account still active on copper, ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), or a PBX (private branch exchange) that depends on either.
Not every exposed line carries the same risk. Segment the mapped base into:
At scale, manual provisioning simply cannot keep pace with a regulator-driven deadline affecting thousands of accounts at once. The same zero-touch logic used to eliminate physical SIM logistics for mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) applies directly here — see our guide on how eSIM and instant provisioning are ending the logistics nightmare for MVNOs for the same automation principle applied to a different infrastructure layer.
Strategic Insight: Providers preparing for a switch-off wave often consolidate wholesale voice capacity onto a single aggregated interconnect ahead of time, rather than negotiating fresh routing for every batch of migrating customers. Enreach's Global SIP Trunking is built for exactly this kind of aggregated capacity planning.
Voice lines are the visible part of a switch-off. The costly surprises come from devices quietly depending on the same copper:
Strategic Insight: For enterprise accounts running a mixed fixed and mobile estate, consolidating these edge-case lines onto a single managed platform during the switch-off — rather than migrating them piecemeal later — reduces both cost and risk. Enreach's EUPCloud supports this kind of single-platform consolidation.
| Dimension | Reactive approach | Proactive, industrialized campaign |
|---|---|---|
| Timing | Customer calls in a panic near the deadline | Provider reaches out ahead of the stop-sell date |
| Account mapping | Discovered account-by-account, ad hoc | Full base cross-referenced against the regulator's schedule in advance |
| Mission-critical devices | Found only when they fail | Identified and tested before cutover |
| Provisioning | Manual, one account at a time | Automated, batch-based |
| Commercial outcome | Retention only, at best | Retention plus new-account acquisition from competitors' exposed customers |
No. The UK has a fixed national deadline (31 January 2027, set by Openreach under Ofcom), while markets like Australia retire copper region by region as fibre becomes available. Always check the specific regulator or incumbent operator's published schedule for each market you serve.
Alarms, lift emergency phones, payment terminals, and telecare devices are the most frequently overlooked, since they are rarely tracked alongside standard voice lines and often require a tested replacement rather than a simple swap.
Yes. Customers whose existing provider has not proactively contacted them about the switch-off are actively looking for a migration path, which makes a timed, well-targeted outreach campaign an effective acquisition channel, not only a retention exercise.
Mapping should start as soon as a stop-sell date is announced for a given exchange or region, since new copper orders are typically blocked well before the final withdrawal date, and migration for mission-critical lines takes longer to validate than standard voice lines.
Whether you're facing a fixed national deadline or a rolling regional switch-off, Enreach's team can help you plan aggregated capacity and automated provisioning for the migration. Talk to the Enreach for Service Providers team.
Global
Austria
Denmark
France
Germany
Italy
Latvia
Netherlands
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom
