The PSTN switch-off may get all the headlines, but really, it’s just the most visible part of a much wider reset.
One that’s pulling copper out of the fabric of UK infrastructure — from lift lines to alarms to meters — while also collapsing 4,500 exchanges down to around 1,000.
On paper, it’s a move to a cleaner, all-IP future. In practice, that scale of change exposes resilience gaps and hidden dependencies that fibre alone can’t solve.
By January 2027, every WLR-based service — from analogue lines to ISDN2 and ISDN30 — will be switched off.
But the impact goes far beyond voice. Copper lines have been in place for decades and are woven into the fabric of everyday infrastructure:
Many businesses don’t even own these lines directly; they’re often buried in walls, tucked away in basements, risers, and cabinets, shared in buildings, or tied to landlords or forgotten contracts. That makes “like-for-like replacement” a messy and expensive task, not a neat technical upgrade.
The PSTN story usually stops at “move to fibre.” But the real driver is exchange rationalisation.
Copper needed a huge footprint — 4,500 exchanges across the UK — to carry signals. Fibre doesn’t. So Openreach is shrinking the estate down to ~1,000.
That’s efficient, but it breaks the old resilience models. RO2 topologies for Ethernet will have to be redesigned, and FTTP offers no built-in resilience at all.
Fibre may be more reliable than copper, but it’s not invincible. Roadworks, flooding, or power cuts can still take it out.
And crucially: in some cases, wires aren’t the best option to begin with.
Running fibre to a lift shaft, retrofitting it into an alarm panel, or trenching it to rural pumping stations or temporary sites often makes no sense. These are the use cases where cellular isn’t a fallback; it’s the smarter primary choice.
So the challenge isn’t only replacing copper endpoints. It’s ensuring resilience in a network that’s being rebuilt from the ground up.
This is where cellular IoT connectivity steps in. Not as a blunt replacement, but as a solution-fit set of tools that can handle the gaps in the UK’s infrastructure.
Cellular IoT connectivity isn’t just a SIM card you pick up off the shelf. It’s business-grade infrastructure in its own right and a fully-fledged alternative to fixed lines — only faster to deploy, more resilient by design, and built for the flexibility businesses need during the PSTN reset.
With multi-network access it delivers resilience that fixed lines can’t match; with private APNs and static IPs it gives the control and security customers expect from enterprise services; and with automated failover it keeps critical systems running through outages.
Cellular, when done right, is centrally managed, remotely controlled, and instantly visible. That means:
That’s a game-changer in the PSTN context.
When you’re replacing thousands of “hidden” copper endpoints (lifts, alarms, meters), the ability to see, control, and fix them remotely saves huge amounts of operational pain.
Most importantly: cellular IoT connectivity operates entirely outside the exchange footprint. So while fibre migrations grind on, cellular keeps businesses connected without disruption.
For many businesses, the PSTN switch-off looks like a problem: legacy lines disappearing, hidden inventory issues, resilience gaps.
For resellers, it’s an opportunity. An opening to step in as advisors, help customers navigate the messy realities, and move them toward solutions that don’t just replace copper, but make them more resilient, flexible, and future-ready.
Cellular IoT connectivity, applied in a solution-fit way, is the missing infrastructure piece that makes that possible.
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