Openreach details when broadband survives the PSTN switch-off — and warns it 'cannot be guaranteed in every case'

9 November 2026. Openreach has published a new industry briefing spelling out when broadband can survive the UK's switch-off of the traditional phone network — and the headline is a warning as much as a promise. Under the plan, anyone still on a legacy analogue line when the PSTN closes on 31 January 2027 lands on a temporary Emergency Voice Access (eVAC) service — and under the original design, migrating voice to eVAC killed the linked broadband, because FTTC and shared (SMPF) broadband physically rely on the copper voice bearer. Openreach is now building a mechanism to keep that broadband running in a standalone state after the voice line is migrated or ceased. The catch, in the operator's own words: continuity "will depend on the individual line and technical configuration and cannot be guaranteed in every case."

What the briefing actually says

The detail matters for a specific group: customers who fail to migrate by the deadline and end up on WLR3 eVAC, the last-resort service that keeps voice working (at a higher wholesale cost, around £35–£38.60 a month) while shedding features. The briefing confirms that eVAC does not support broadband the way the old PSTN product did — there is no "eVAC + FTTC" option — because FTTC and SMPF broadband depend on the presence of an underlying copper voice bearer. Openreach's fix is to break the link between the broadband service and the WLR line during the voice migration, so broadband continues as a standalone service. Communications providers can also ask Openreach to cease a WLR3 voice line while preserving its associated SLU broadband — a deliberate "lose voice, keep broadband" option — but providers must identify those lines and submit requests before the 31 January deadline.

Not a rescue plan — a temporary scaffold

Openreach is blunt that this is a temporary measure, not a long-term alternative: broadband left in legacy products will be withdrawn in line with eVAC's own timescales, and the PSTN timetable itself is unchanged. Migrations that preserve broadband are not expected to start until around mid-April 2027 — meaning weeks after the closure, stranded customers wait with no guarantee. The context: roughly 1 million UK lines were still on legacy copper in the latest count, down from 1.5 million in July 2026, including about 300,000 business premises. Many of the households affected rely on the same broadband for telecare — which is why Openreach is building the bridge at all.

The business read: don't build a plan on a caveat

For a small business, the lesson is that "the network might keep your broadband on" is not a migration strategy — it is a line-by-line maybe, delivered weeks after the deadline, on a service explicitly designed to push you off. The robust plan is to move voice and number deliberately before 31 January 2027: a UK virtual number ports off the copper line and keeps answering whatever happens to the bearer, with calls routed to mobiles and answered through a SIP softphone from free pay-as-you-go or Pay Monthly at £9.97 a month. Where the line feeds an alarm panel rather than a handset, the PSTN's exit needs a signalling plan too — TAP-to-SMS alarm alerting replaces the dial-up path. The dates and sequence are tracked in our PSTN switch-off guide, and the migration-rate numbers behind the count are in our one-million-lines piece.

Related: Openreach's eVAC safety net keeps broadband alive · One million lines to go and the 6 November LOA deadline · The PSTN switch-off guide