Openreach cancels copper at 163 exchangesOpenreach cancels copper at 163 exchanges

The telco's infrastructure arm Openreach plans to withdraw copper-based phone and broadband from sale at another 163 exchanges. This so-called 'stop sell' will affect more than 960,000 premises.

Openreach's retail ISP customers – including Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone and parent BT – have been given a year to upgrade customers, or at the very least switch them onto an equivalent fibre service.

Openreach explained that a stop sell is triggered when fibre is available to 75% of premises connected to a particular exchange.

By mid-February, stop sells will have been triggered at 852 exchanges serving more than 7 million premises. This equates to 40% of Openreach's current fibre network, which covered 17 million premises as of the end of last year.

As the incumbent, BT has to tread particularly carefully when it makes mention of switching off its legacy network.

It can quite easily cause a panic if any users who still rely on analogue for services like medical-related alarms and so-on get it into their heads that their phone and broadband is about to get cut off. For the avoidance of doubt, Openreach said any premises that fall outside Openreach's fibre footprint will still be able to get copper based phone and broadband services.

"The stop sell programme is a critical part of ensuring that the UK's communication infrastructure is ready to meet the demands of the future," said James Lilley, Openreach's managed customer migrations manager.

"Taking advantage of the progress of our full fibre build and encouraging people to upgrade where a majority can access our new network is the right thing to do as it makes no sense, both operationally and commercially, to keep the old copper network and our new fibre network running side-by-side," he said. "As copper's ability to support modern communications declines, the immediate focus is getting people onto newer, future proofed technologies."

It appears to be going fairly well so far.

As previously disclosed, orders increased 26% last year, and 5.5 million premises now use Openreach's fibre, giving a take-up rate of 35% as of the end of September – up from 33% a year earlier.

Meanwhile, broadband traffic on Openreach's network is also on the up. It surged by 10.5% last year to 103,590 Petabytes (PB), with 1 December recorded as the single busiest day at 405 PB.

"We're moving to a digital world and Openreach is helping with that transformation by rolling out ultrafast, ultra-reliable, and future-proofed digital full fibre across the UK," declared Lilley. "This game changing technology will become the backbone of our economy for decades to come, supporting every aspect of our public services, businesses, industries and daily lives."

With rival wholesalers like Nexfibre recently hitting the 2 million premises milestone, and CityFibre having built – or in the process of deploying – to 6 million of its 8 million targeted premises, copper is inching closer to being consigned to the history books.