Your landline has a shelf life. The UK's old copper phone network, the one that's carried most business calls since the 1980s, switches off for good on 31 January 2027. No extensions, no opt-out. If your business is still running a traditional line or an ISDN system, that's not a maybe. It's a when.
This piece covers what changes when you move to VoIP, what it actually costs against a landline, whether the reliability worries hold up, and how to tell if now's your moment to switch. No sales pitch, no countdown clock designed to rush you.
A traditional landline runs on the PSTN, the Public Switched Telephone Network. Every call opens a dedicated circuit down a physical copper wire, all the way to an exchange. Reliable technology. Also decades old, expensive for Openreach to maintain, and increasingly unable to do what modern offices need it to do, like route calls to a mobile when nobody's at a desk.
Many small businesses run ISDN rather than a basic line, which lets a few calls happen at once down the same connection. Same ageing infrastructure underneath, just with more lines bundled in.
Most businesses don't realise you can no longer buy a new PSTN or ISDN line even if you wanted to. Openreach stopped selling them in September 2023. Every existing line is now on borrowed time, counting down to that January 2027 deadline.
VoIP works differently. Calls travel as data over your internet connection instead of copper, using the same broadband that already runs your emails and your card machine. There's no dedicated line, and no exchange equipment gathering dust in a cupboard. It's the kind of connectivity we manage day to day under our Unified Communications & Connectivity service, so if you want the fuller walkthrough of features and providers, we've covered that separately in our complete guide to business phone systems for Oxfordshire businesses.
Before you assume you're only replacing a phone, check what else is running over that copper line. Card machines, alarm systems, lift emergency phones, door entry systems and fax machines can all still depend on the same ageing network. An audit before you switch anything off will save you a headache later.
Numbers matter more than adjectives here.
A traditional business line typically costs somewhere between £25 and £40 per line, per month, before you've made a single call. Add call charges on top, then factor in the PBX hardware and the cabling that keeps it all running. Costs that stack up and rarely get questioned once they're on the bill.
VoIP tends to work out at roughly £8 to £25 per user, per month, usually with UK calls included in that price. There's typically little to no hardware to buy. Staff can make and take calls from a laptop, a headset or an app on their phone, wherever they happen to be working that day.
Businesses that make the switch commonly report savings in the region of 30 to 60 percent on their monthly phone costs. Treat that as a typical range rather than a promise. Your own figure depends on what you're replacing and how many lines you're currently paying for.
The bigger point isn't the headline price on either side. It's the total cost. A landline setup that looks cheap on paper often carries hardware, maintenance and call charges that never show up until you add them together.
The doubts about VoIP reliability aren't unfounded, but they're often only half the picture.
The genuine trade-off first. A traditional line can carry on working in a power cut, because it's powered from the exchange rather than your building. VoIP needs your internet connection and your local power to be up. That's a real difference, not a myth.
The nuance most people miss is this. Ofcom requires phone providers to give at least one hour of power resilience so people can still reach emergency services during a power cut, but that protection is aimed at at-risk residential customers, not businesses. If you run VoIP, that safety net doesn't automatically cover you, so you need to build your own, which is exactly the territory our Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity service is built for.
A small UPS on your router buys you time during a short outage. A 4G or 5G backup connection keeps calls moving if your broadband drops. Most hosted VoIP systems will also auto-divert calls to a mobile if your internet goes down, so a call doesn't just disappear.
For the vast majority of small businesses running on decent broadband, VoIP is reliable day to day, comfortably. The real question isn't landline versus VoIP. It's whether you've planned for the one scenario where any internet-based system needs a bit of backup.
For most businesses still on a traditional line, yes, and the timing matters more than it might feel like it does right now.
The stop-sell has already happened. Engineer availability and number-porting slots will only get tighter as January 2027 gets closer, as every remaining business on copper tries to migrate in the same window. Leaving it late doesn't avoid the switch. It just means less choice over when it happens.
Before you move, check two things rather than assume them. First, your broadband needs to be solid enough to carry voice calls cleanly, which for most offices with decent fibre isn't an issue. Second, go back to that audit of hidden analogue devices from earlier. Better to know now than to discover your alarm system was relying on the line you've just switched off.
Your existing number comes with you. Number porting is a regulated process, and providers typically quote around 5 to 10 working days to complete a business move, though simple single-number ports can sometimes finish within a day. Just don't cancel your old line before the port has actually completed, or you risk losing the number permanently.
We'll be covering the Big Switch Off itself in far more depth next month, including what it means for the wider services running on your lines. For now, the deadline is real, it's fixed, and it's coming whether you've planned for it or not.
A landline gives you a phone number. VoIP gives you a phone system. And after January 2027, the landline stops being an option anyway.
None of this needs to be a scramble. Done properly, moving to VoIP is a lot less disruptive than most business owners expect, and it comes with cost savings that are hard to ignore once you've seen the numbers side by side.
If you want a straight answer on what your business actually needs, and what it will realistically cost, that's exactly the sort of conversation we have every week. No jargon, no pressure, and definitely no "enterprise-grade military-level" nonsense. Book a 360 review with us, or just get in touch and talk it through.