On 24 September 2026, Openreach confirmed that the closure date for the analogue phone network, the PSTN, has not moved: 31 January 2027. About 1.2 million lines are still on it, and around 350,000 of those serve business premises. In July the figure was about 1.5 million, so the queue is shrinking, but not fast enough to clear by itself.
The same announcement described the safety net. Lines that have not moved by the deadline may be placed on a temporary service called EVAc, which Openreach describes as a limited, last resort voice service. It cannot be ordered in advance, capacity is not unlimited, it is charged for, and lines that are not migrated will be ceased in tranches. Openreach’s own summary: “No one should wait for the PSTN to close before upgrading.”
Most coverage of the switch-off is about office phones. This article is about the equipment bolted to the wall that nobody thinks of as a phone.
What this means for your building
A surprising amount of building safety and security equipment was designed to make a phone call. Openreach and GOV.UK both list the usual suspects, and fire and rescue services have started warning businesses directly. In the buildings we look after, it comes down to five things:
- Fire alarm signalling. A digital communicator or older signalling unit that sends activations and faults to an alarm receiving centre (ARC) over a phone line.
- Intruder alarm signalling. The same arrangement on the security side, often on the same line.
- Door entry. Older telephone based systems that ring a resident’s or tenant’s landline from the street panel, rather than a handset wired to the panel.
- Lift emergency phones. The autodialler behind the alarm button in the lift car.
- Warden call, telecare and plant alarms. Anything that dials a monitoring centre or a mobile number when it trips.
The risk is not that these fail loudly on 1 February. It is that they fail quietly. A fire alarm panel will still sound in the building with a dead phone line behind it. What stops is the call for help, and you only find out when nobody comes.
If monitoring is part of your fire strategy, or a condition on your insurance schedule, that is not a minor fault. Article 17 of the Fire Safety Order requires fire safety equipment to be kept in efficient working order, and a signalling path that no longer connects to anything is not in working order.
Why plugging it into the router is not a fix
When a line is migrated, the phone socket usually moves to the back of a broadband router. It is tempting to plug the alarm dialler into it and move on. Three problems:
- Power. GOV.UK is plain about this: an analogue line carries its own power from the exchange, and a digital line cannot. If the router has no battery backup, a power cut takes the signalling down at exactly the moment a fire is most likely to go unnoticed.
- Signalling tones. Alarm diallers send data as tones designed for a copper line. Over a digital voice service those tones may not arrive intact. Some units work, some work most of the time, which is worse.
- Supervision. A single path with nothing checking it can fail without telling anyone.
EVAc does not solve this either. It is described as a basic voice service that “may not support all calling features”. Nothing in Openreach’s announcement says it will carry alarm signalling, and you should not plan on it.
What to check before Christmas
- List every phone line the building pays for. Ask accounts for the bills. Lines nobody can explain are usually the ones feeding an alarm, a lift or a door panel.
- Trace each line to a device. Your fire and security maintainer can tell you in one visit what the panel signals over. Ask them to write it down.
- Ask your ARC what path your signals arrive on. They can see it. If the answer is a single phone line, you have work to do.
- Ask your phone provider for your migration date. Providers are moving lines in batches now, and some customers find out afterwards.
- After any line change, test the signal. Put the system on test with the ARC, trigger it, and confirm they received both a fire signal and a fault signal. Record the result in the logbook.
- Speak to your lift contractor. Lift phones are their equipment, not the alarm company’s, and they are booking up.
Do not leave this to January. Engineers, signalling units and ARC connection slots all get scarce as a hard deadline approaches.
How Gemini helps
We replace phone line signalling with dual path fire alarm monitoring: 4G radio and IP, each path supervised, so a failed path is reported instead of silently tolerated. The same applies to intruder alarm and wider security monitoring, and we take over systems we did not install. Where a telephone based entry panel is at the end of its life, we survey and replace it with modern door entry. We do not maintain lifts, but we will tell you if we find a lift line during a survey.
If you are choosing what to move to, our comparison of fire alarm monitoring options covers it. To have your signalling paths checked, request a survey or call 0330 043 0080.
