Two different networks are being switched off, on two different timetables, and they break two different kinds of equipment. They are easy to read as one story, and the difference decides which of your equipment you need to look at.
Here’s what each one is, and what it actually takes offline, and the questions worth asking your provider before the first deadline lands.
| PSTN switch-off | 2G switch-off | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | The analogue phone network, retired by BT Group | The oldest mobile network generation |
| Date | 31 January 2027 | From May 2029, complete by 2033 |
| What breaks | Anything signalling over a copper phone line | Cellular devices that can only speak 2G |
| Typical casualties | Hard-wired alarm panels, lift lines, landline telecare pendants, CCTV links | Older tracking units, alarm SIMs, telecare on mobile |
The two lists barely overlap. A site can be completely exposed to one and entirely untouched by the other, and you cannot tell which by looking at the box on the wall. You have to know how the thing signals.
Openreach is retiring the analogue network. Its own PSTN switch-off notice states that “BT Group will retire the PSTN network by 31st January 2027”, and the date has been described as locked since the last delay moved it from December 2025.
The scale of what is left is the surprising part. As of February 2026 Openreach’s own migration figures put the total at roughly 2.8 million lines still to migrate, with more than half a million serving business premises. Its own data counts more than 12,000 lift lines and around 500 lines serving CCTV networks, alongside fire and burglar alarms and payment terminals.
Lift lines are the ones we would look at first. An emergency phone in a lift is a lone worker control, whether or not anybody has ever called it that, and it is exactly the kind of thing that gets tested annually and thought about never.
If any of your safety equipment dials out over a phone line, it is on this list. That includes the panic alarm systems wired into older buildings, which we’ve written about separately in our guide to panic alarms for businesses and staff.
No. This is the confusion worth clearing up, because it sends people looking in the wrong place.
A lone worker app on a phone, or a dedicated device with a SIM in it, signals over the mobile network. It has no relationship with the copper phone network and nothing about 31 January 2027 changes how it works. Buying new lone worker devices because of the PSTN switch-off is solving a problem you do not have.
What the PSTN retirement does affect is the fixed infrastructure around those workers. The alarm panel in the building. The lift phone. The telecare unit in a tenant’s home if you run housing or care services. Those are separate procurement decisions from your lone worker kit, and they are the ones with a 2027 date on them.
Analogue lines were powered from the telephone exchange, so they kept working when the building lost power. Digital lines run through a router plugged into the wall, and when the power goes, so does the line.
Ofcom’s answer is a floor rather than a fix. Ofcom’s rules on protecting customers during the digital landline migration require providers to offer “a minimum of one hour’s power resilience to consumers in the event of a power cut” for access to emergency services. One hour.
Treat that as the regulatory minimum and not as a design target. If your risk assessment assumes someone can raise an alarm during a prolonged outage, one hour of battery on the router is worth knowing about now rather than during the outage. The government’s Telecare National Action Plan, published on 11 February 2025, has providers working towards backup that exceeds Ofcom’s hour, which tells you what the people closest to the problem think of the minimum.
It has already happened, at scale, and the regulator has put a number on it.
On 1 December 2025 Ofcom fined Virgin Media £23.8 million over its treatment of telecare customers during migration. Between August 2022 and December 2023 the company failed to properly identify telecare users, then disconnected thousands of them despite knowing the risk, cutting their link to alarm monitoring centres. Ofcom found “serious systemic failures” and said the company had “failed to comply with its own policies and procedures for the fair and appropriate treatment of vulnerable consumers”.
Around 2 million people in the UK use telecare services. The Action Plan now commits providers to a clear rule: no telecare user is migrated without someone confirming they have a compatible and functioning solution in place.
Useful thing to take from this if you are responsible for any monitored safety equipment. “Our telecoms provider is handling the migration” is not a plan, and it is not a defence. Somebody at your organisation needs to know which devices moved, when, and whether anyone tested them afterwards. The government’s own telecare migration guidance says telecare devices “have a higher rate of failure when they are connected to digital telephone landlines”, so a device that migrated is not automatically a device that works.
3G is already gone. All four UK networks have completed their 3G retirement, and Three never ran a 2G network at all.
2G is going next, and this is the one that reaches mobile safety devices. The dates differ by operator, which matters more than it might sound:
One deadline has already passed, and it is the one nobody notices. O2 withdrew 2G access for inbound roaming from 1 October 2025, creating what Ofcom’s 3G and 2G switch-off guidance calls “2G inbound roaming not-spots”. Devices running on international roaming SIMs may already have lost coverage they used to have, in places nobody has checked since.
Ofcom is unusually direct about this, and it is worth knowing before you have the conversation with your supplier.
Ofcom’s advice for IoT and third-party device suppliers says responsibility for “ensuring the continuity of service after 2G networks are switched off” sits with the device supplier, not with you and not with the mobile network. Ofcom expects suppliers to identify affected customers, to tell them clearly, and to upgrade equipment to “at least 4G-capable”. Among the device categories it names explicitly are “Telecare, Fire, Security” alarms.
Alongside that, the government published a 2G Switch-off Charter on 24 March 2026, signed by VMO2, VodafoneThree, EE, Tesco Mobile and Sky Mobile. It commits operators to announce a switch-off date “a minimum of 3 years before it begins”, to verify that reliable 4G or 5G coverage exists before switching anything off, and to flag to government where losing 2G would hit “life critical services”.
Read the charter for what it is. It is voluntary, not regulation, so it does not give you a right to enforce. What it does give you is a planning assumption: three years’ notice before any operator pulls the trigger, and a commitment that coverage gets checked first.
Six questions, in the order we would ask them.
If question two or four sends you looking at replacement hardware, our guide to the best lone worker devices and solutions covers what to compare, and check-call systems is worth a read if you are rebuilding the process around the kit at the same time.
Our lone worker devices are cellular, so the PSTN retirement does not touch them. Nothing about 31 January 2027 changes how they work.
On question two, the answer for the Safepoint lone worker device is 4G LTE and WiFi. It does not depend on 2G, so the switch-off starting in 2029 does not affect it, and it already meets the “at least 4G-capable” standard Ofcom expects suppliers to be upgrading equipment to.
The device also carries a multi-network SIM that roams rather than sitting on one network, which answers point four. It does not inherit any single operator’s timetable. The two points are worth keeping apart, because they are different risks. Roaming spreads operator risk. Radio generations decide whether the hardware can reach a network at all.
If your staff use the Safepoint app, the device is the phone in their pocket, so the radio generations are the handset’s. Worth checking those on the same list as everything else here. The app itself works across GPS, cell signal and WiFi, and keeps running in a dead-zone if the task was already active.
On Monitored plans, alarms route to an Alarm Receiving Centre operated by ADT, a Category 1 centre built and operated to BS EN 50518. That end of the chain has to stay reachable too, which is worth asking of any monitoring arrangement rather than only of the device someone is carrying. We’ve explained what alarm receiving centres do if the term is new.
Ofcom publishes the current 2G and 3G position and its advice for device suppliers, and Openreach publishes the PSTN migration timetable and its stop-sell position exchange by exchange. Both are worth an hour if you are responsible for equipment that has to work when somebody is in trouble.
The one date to put in a calendar today is 31 January 2027, and the one to put next to it is whichever of your suppliers still owes you an answer about it.
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