Your business phone line stops working in 2027.

Openreach is retiring the analogue telephone network — the copper-based system that has carried UK phone calls for over a century. Every phone line still running on it has to move to a digital, internet-based service before 31 January 2027. This is not a marketing deadline invented by providers; it is a national infrastructure programme, and Ofcom has confirmed the date is final after one earlier extension from December 2025.

Your line stops working. There is no grace period and no fallback — the exchange equipment is being decommissioned. Businesses that leave it to the last months will be joining a queue of hundreds of thousands of others competing for the same engineers and installation slots, which is both slower and more expensive than moving now.

Almost always, yes. Moving a number between providers is called porting and it is a regulated process every UK provider has to support. The important thing is timing: porting has its own timescales and cannot be rushed, so if your number matters to your business you want the process started with months to spare rather than weeks. We ask about this early precisely so we only match you with providers who can commit to it.

Typically £8 to £18 per user per month in the UK, depending on features. That replaces both your line rental and your on-site system maintenance, which is why most businesses end up paying 40–60% less overall. A ten-desk office commonly goes from around £520 a month to around £260.

Sometimes. Newer IP handsets from the common manufacturers can often be reused, which saves on hardware. Older analogue and digital handsets tied to a traditional PBX generally cannot. Providers will tell you which of yours can be carried over, and it is worth asking, because handsets are the one genuinely up-front cost in a switch.

These are the details that catch businesses out, because they often sit on the same old lines and are easy to forget. Alarm panels, lift emergency phones, door entry systems and some card terminals all need checking, and some need replacing or reconfiguring. Mention them when you get quoted — a provider who does not ask about them is not looking closely enough.

For a small office with no number porting, a switch can be live within a week. If you are porting existing numbers, allow four to six weeks as a realistic planning figure, and longer if you have a large block of numbers or a complicated setup. That is the main reason we push people to start now rather than in mid-2026.

Usually not. A cloud phone call uses roughly 100 kbps per concurrent call, so even a modest business connection handles a ten-person office comfortably. What matters more than raw speed is stability, and whether your router prioritises voice traffic. Providers check this as part of quoting, and will say if your line is genuinely not up to it.

It is free to you. We are paid a referral fee by the provider if you go on to take out a contract with them — this is the standard model for comparison services, and it is why we do not charge you anything. It does mean we only show offers from providers we work with rather than every provider in the market, which is why we say so plainly in the footer and here.

You will be contacted by the providers we match you to, because that is how you get a quote. We do not sell your details on to unrelated third parties, and we do not pass them to a dozen companies at once. You can tell us to stop at any point and we will remove your details.

Worth checking anyway. Many businesses find their contract ends well before the switch-off, and some find they are already out of contract and paying a rolled-over rate. If you do have time left to run, the useful thing is knowing your end date so the move can be planned to land just after it rather than incurring an exit fee.

Not if it is set up properly. Cloud systems let you set a failover so calls divert automatically to mobiles when the internet connection drops, which is something the old analogue lines could never do. It is worth asking each provider how their failover works, because the quality of it varies.