With its upgrade having reached 20 million homes, Openreach has now pivoted its strategy towards awareness: migrate your networks, or risk missing out.
James Lilley, director of All-IP at Openreach, has been a strong advocate for educating people around the switch-off. Earlier in the year, he said “the digital world won’t wait for those that stall,” suggesting that businesses that fail to mitigate risk could face service outages, operational disruption and financial losses.
He has now told Capacity that Openreach is at a pivotal point in its switch-off timeline.
“We started four or five years ago and we had 15 million customers on the network,” he said. “We’re now down to about three and a half million, but we’ve got about 16 months left and I think this is where the harder customer support challenges will really come out.”
Migrating people to new networks
Harder challenges for Lilley mean the more vulnerable customers, including elderly customers that have telecare devices or other critical equipment that’s connected. Businesses also might have to complete equipment changes before the migration, or critical national infrastructure like lifts or alarms cannot stop working.
“Now it’s about how do we support the remaining customers to move off the legacy services,” he added. “We have launched our home telecare service, which has been a long time in the making to get right. We’ve trained up 4,000 engineers across the country to be able to test home telecare devices, which is a game changer for, so there isn’t any reason now why customers with telecare can’t be migrated.”
Openreach is launching its new telecare migration service across the UK in October, following the success of its Prove Telecare Pilot. The service is designed to ensure that service providers can safely migrate vulnerable customers who rely on telecare devices to a new digital phone service operating over fibre and off the Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), which is being switched off in 2027.
“No one ever wants to lose service for those customers,” Lilley said. “An engineer can test the device beforehand to make sure it’s working before they start anything. They never leave a customer without a working telecare device after a migration.
“If, for whatever reason, it doesn’t work, they put everything back as it was. Then go back and do it again. It’s aimed at not leaving anyone behind.”
Why is digital migration necessary?
Openreach also offers a range of other products to businesses to support migration, including other technologies that emulate the PSTN. For landline-dependent customers or businesses, the company now has an offload option to proactively migrate.
Lilley added: “We’ve never been in a better place to close this thing down. There isn’t really a customer now that doesn’t have a path to be off the PSTN.”
For those who haven’t yet migrated, Openreach has to assume that they are at risk of having their services turned off. To confront this issue, Lilley explained that Openreach is working to raise awareness of what customers need to do.
“That might mean they need to look for another provider that will help and support them through the migration,” he said. “Some customers don’t want to move – they refuse, so there are products where we can move them onto a non-PSTN technology remotely, without the customer having to do anything.”
For businesses, one of the critical challenges Lilley identified is them knowing what is using the network.
“If you don’t understand what’s there, you might get a surprise when something doesn’t work,” he says. “I think the key thing for businesses is: don’t wait. Because sometimes these things take time to sort out.”
Moving towards a more fibre-driven word
Eager to make sure there are as few roadblocks as possible, Openreach is helping customers with the migration. A significant part of that is fibre.
“This is a once-in-a-generation migration event in the industry and so we’d love to avoid people going to a copper-based solution only to have to migrate to fibre later,” Lilley explained. “The fibre rollout is super important. It’s a one-move solution.”
He added: “We are coming up to the final year of the programme next year, where we’ll have added time pressure. We’re focusing on what we need to do commercially and what else needs to happen in this final year – signalling to the industry that this should be a call to action.”
Improved and faster connectivity, for Openreach, is a gateway to a more switched-on future. The company is looking at fibre and other innovations to help customers and businesses.
“It’s about the future. Customers can do so much when they have access to a reliable broadband network, but a lot of landline-only customers don’t have access to broadband yet,” Lilley says. “Moving to digital means they can access more, including online services, NHS apps and others things that they haven’t had access to before.”
He added: “The PSTN is becoming a lot less reliable now because it’s getting old, so it becomes increasingly risky. The fibre network is about 60% more reliable than the copper service and then obviously once you are there, you’re future-proofed for 5G or whatever comes next.”
This type of evolution is already starting to enable ISPs to do more innovation at the service level, including scam call blocking, to offer better services to their customers.
Openreach’s role is in testing – with pilots coming online over the next few months, in addition to trialling three exchanges.
Lilley explains: “We’re close to closing our first exchange on the copper side of things. As we get into the first phase of our exchange programme, we’ve got Mildenhall and other quite important to test. We’re very close.”
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