Posted on: 4th March 2025, by Magrathea
As everyone is aware by now (one would hope!), if all goes to plan all Openreach products that rely on the existing copper based PSTN network will cease to work come January 2027. To that end, the sale of new connections is only offered via fibre-based solutions.
The collection of products that are winding down are referred to as Wholesale Line Rental (WLR). BT Group have been required to offer WLR products since 2002, when the regulator – Oftel at the time, determined that they had a dominant position and forcing them to offer WLR would allow for competition. For the first time, almost any comms provider could have access to the services that would allow them to compete with the dominant string of BT businesses.
It was a little later, in 2006 after an Ofcom review, that Openreach was formed in order to give more separation between the provision of wholesale services and the arms of BT that provided service to consumers. Again, this was to ensure that all communication providers could operate on a fair playing field. This model has largely proven successful with hundreds of resellers delivering phone lines to the UK market.
Of course, for a good while now those phone lines have been critical to the delivery of broadband into premises. In fact, it’s been next to impossible to have broadband alone without paying for a telephone line over which to run it – much to the chagrin of many an early adopter of over the top (OTT) voice services or those who have wanted to abandon their ‘home phone’ in favour of using their mobiles.
However, that has now all changed of course with things entirely flipping around. Openreach will no longer offer a voice service at all – meaning the communication provider has no choice but to provide broadband and then lay an OTT service on top if voice calls are needed. We have already written plenty about the pros and cons but the fact remains, this is how the UK voice and data networks are going to work going forward so we all need to embrace it.
The current situation is that there are still millions of users to be migrated across from WLR to an alternative fibre product and, particularly in the more complex business space, it’s not always plain sailing!
Whilst we see the exciting headlines about number of premises that now have access to full fibre, the reality is that those figures are disproportionately loaded towards residential premises. We haven’t been able to obtain figures that show a split between business and residential but our anecdotal evidence is that businesses have once again not been afforded the attention than they deserve. This has been a concern from the beginning of the WLR shutdown process, when initially there were no business grade alternatives available from Openreach.
Much has been written about the challenges and joys of the migration to an all-IP network so we won’t dwell, but one thing we do want to highlight is the scenario when an end user only has the option to migrate to SOGEA right now (part copper/part fibre) but wants to keep their telephone number which was originally assigned by BT or Openreach. This is making up a large portion of the orders we are seeing and it seems it’s not widely known that there is a process in place to make this a little simpler.
When you submit a new SOGEA order through your chosen broadband provider (which may or may not be Magrathea!), you can transfer your customers number to us so we can handle the voice calls using the ‘SOGEA Integral Transfer’ process.
Simply access our Porting Portal, via MAGIC, and follow the SOGEA menu. Once you enter the phone number you want to move you will be given a prefix and cupid. Those details can then be submitted with your SOGEA order, instructing Openreach to export the number to Magrathea.
Once you have a confirmed transfer date from the SOGEA provider, simply update the entry in our Porting Portal and that will trigger us to do the associated databuild so the number is up and running as soon as the transfer is complete.
Openreach have built into this process a short “parallel running” period, which means that the WLR line is still operational or up to seven days. It is up to you to test the new SOGEA connection and trigger the release of the phone number with Openreach. If you don’t, it will happen automatically at the end of the parallel running period.
Our experience so far is that this process works well, it’s solved a lot of headaches for our clients already and offers a fairly straightforward way to migrate your WLR estate.
The countdown is seriously on now to get migrated away from WLR, so if you need any support either with new broadband connections or with migrating phone numbers – please do reach out to our team who are always happy to help.