For most organisations, retiring the old telephone network sounds like a telecoms project.
A line changes.
A router is installed.
The telephone is connected differently.
The monthly bill moves from one product to another.
Adult social care cannot afford to see the transition that simply.
The technology underpinning the traditional landline network—the Public Switched Telephone Network—is being retired, and all PSTN-reliant devices and UK landlines need to be upgraded by January 2027. Government guidance explicitly identifies not only telephones but alarm systems, telecare devices, door-entry systems, lifts and other business equipment among the technologies that can be affected.
For a care provider, the telephone on reception may therefore be the least interesting part of the change.
The real risk may sit inside a piece of equipment that nobody in the organisation thinks of as a telephone.
A lift emergency unit.
A door-entry panel.
A telecare alarm.
A fire or security dialler.
A piece of monitoring equipment.
A call system installed several years ago.
A connection supplied through the landlord rather than the care provider.
Or simply an old cable disappearing into a wall whose original purpose nobody can now confidently explain.
With only months remaining, that changes the question.
It is no longer:
Have we upgraded our telephone system?
It is:
Do we know every care-critical service still dependent on the network that is disappearing—and have we proved that its replacement works?
That is why the digital switchover has become a care-continuity issue.
The final stage may be the most difficult
The digital landline transition has been discussed for years.
That creates a risk of its own.
Familiarity can begin to feel like completion.
Providers have seen supplier letters, webinars, government campaigns and industry updates for long enough that it becomes easy to assume the difficult work must already have been done somewhere else.
But the national Telecare Action Plan exists precisely because migration has proved more complicated for people and services dependent on care technology.
Government estimates that around two million people in the UK use telecare, and it warns that some analogue telecare devices may not operate reliably over digital networks. The national aim is therefore not simply to switch networks but to protect people throughout the transition.
There is also clear evidence of what can happen when the transition is poorly controlled.
In December 2025, Ofcom fined Virgin Media £23.8 million after finding systemic failures in the way some telecare customers had been migrated. Ofcom concluded that known telecare customers had been exposed to direct risk of harm and that some devices had been prevented from connecting to alarm-monitoring centres while disconnections were in place.
That enforcement case matters to the care sector for a reason far beyond the size of the fine.
It demonstrates that telecommunications migration can become a safety event.
And once that is understood, the remaining work deserves attention from registered managers, nominated individuals, estates teams, technology leads and boards—not simply whoever manages the telephone contract.
National protections have improved. Local responsibility has not disappeared.
There are stronger safeguards around migration now than there were during the earlier stages.
In March 2026, government introduced a new Fixed Telecoms Modernisation Charter, a Network Operator Charter and a final engagement protocol intended to make fixed-network modernisation safer, with particular attention to vulnerable customers and people using telecare. The framework was updated again in July as industry participation expanded.
Network operators signing the relevant charter have committed not to migrate a known telecare customer without confirmation from the customer, communications provider or telecare company that a compatible and functioning solution is in place.
That is a significant protection.
It is not a substitute for the care provider understanding its own environment.
A telecoms company can know the telephone account.
It may not know that a lift contractor connected an emergency unit to the second line in 2014.
It may not know that a door-entry system uses another connection.
It may not know whether an alarm is supplied by the landlord, local authority, care provider or specialist technology company.
Government guidance for businesses is explicit: organisations need to review their infrastructure and devices to identify anything relying on legacy networks, including alarms, payment terminals, lifts, intercoms and other equipment.
That shifts the provider’s task from waiting for the telecoms company to tell it what remains to knowing what it owns, uses and depends upon.
The last analogue risk may therefore be less about obsolete technology than incomplete organisational knowledge.
The last ten per cent is where hidden dependency lives
Large transformation programmes rarely finish in a straight line.
The obvious systems move first.
The difficult exceptions remain.
A care group may already have fibre connectivity, cloud-based care records, digital telephony, mobile devices, eMAR and online rostering.
From a board-level summary, the organisation appears thoroughly digital.
Yet one operationally critical service may still depend on a legacy line nobody included within the original migration project.
That is the nature of old infrastructure.
When it works, nobody thinks about it.
A lift telephone sits silently until somebody needs emergency assistance.
A telecare device may remain untouched for months.
A fire panel communicates without becoming part of anyone’s everyday workflow.
A door-entry dialler functions automatically.
The less attention the technology normally requires, the easier it is for ownership to become unclear.
This is why the final phase should not be measured principally by the percentage of telephone lines converted.
The question is what remains unresolved.
The exception register is now more valuable than the completion dashboard.
Follow the care function, not just the telephone number
A care provider could produce a perfect list of telephone numbers and still miss the real risk.
Numbers are not what need protecting.
Functions are.
Take a lift emergency communication system.
The meaningful question is not whether a telephone number is assigned to it.
The meaningful questions begin when the lift stops while somebody is inside it.
Can that person make contact?
Where does the call go?
Does it still work if broadband is unavailable?
Does it still work during a power failure?
How long does any backup last?
Who tests it?
Who receives the alert outside office hours?
What happens if the answer is no?
That approach changes the migration exercise completely.
Instead of asking which lines remain analogue, the organisation asks which essential care, safety and building functions rely on connectivity.
Then it follows each function from beginning to end.
For telecare, that may mean following the path from a person activating the device all the way through to the monitoring centre receiving the event and the correct response being initiated.
A product description saying digital compatible is useful.
An end-to-end test proves something more important:
the service works in the environment in which the person actually depends upon it.
A green light on a device is not the same as an assured service
One of the biggest mistakes in technology migration is testing components rather than outcomes.
The broadband is live.
The router works.
The alarm has power.
The telecare unit displays the correct light.
The migration ticket is closed.
Everything may still not be working end to end.
Digital care and telecare increasingly sit within chains involving several organisations.
The person activates the device.
Local equipment detects the event.
A fixed or mobile network carries the signal.
Potentially a cloud platform processes it.
A monitoring centre receives it.
Somebody interprets the information.
The appropriate response is then triggered.
If one stage is not operating correctly, the service has failed regardless of how many individual components showed a successful test.
The Government’s Telecare National Action Plan is built around this underlying concern: the switchover must protect the person using telecare rather than simply complete a technical migration.
That gives providers a much more useful test of readiness:
Has the service been tested from the person needing help to the person responsible for responding?
If not, migration is not yet assurance.
Power is now part of the connectivity conversation
The move from traditional analogue landlines towards digital voice also changes one of the basic assumptions beneath communications resilience.
Traditional landlines could retain some functionality during a local power cut because the network supplied power to conventional phones.
Digital voice usually depends on powered equipment at the premises.
That may include the router, optical-network equipment, telephony adapter and the care technology attached to them.
Ofcom requires communications providers to offer a minimum of one hour of power resilience where customers need a landline to contact emergency services, with the resilience solution provided free where required.
That protection is important.
It should not automatically be treated as the resilience requirement of a 24-hour care operation.
A care home needs to understand what happens after five minutes without electricity, after one hour and during a prolonged outage.
The answers may be different across different systems.
The nurse-call system may have its own batteries.
The router may have another.
A lift communication unit might fail over to mobile.
The telecare system may contain local battery resilience.
The care-record platform might remain accessible through mobile devices even when fixed broadband fails.
Or several supposedly separate systems may all rely, unnoticed, on the same router, power supply or cabinet.
This is where modern care infrastructure becomes more complex.
Power resilience and communications resilience can no longer be reviewed separately.
Ofcom’s new Network and Service Resilience Guidance, published in June 2026, reflects the wider national significance of this shift. Ofcom notes that as society becomes increasingly dependent on online services, the consequences of telecommunications outages become more serious; the guidance therefore focuses on architecture, availability, operational resilience and the mechanisms communications providers need to maintain dependable services.
Care providers sit downstream of that national infrastructure.
They still need to understand what the dependency means inside their own services.
Care Circle Network Intelligence Insight
One national deadline. Very different starting positions.
Care Circle Network’s Provider Intelligence Observatory gives us a more detailed view of why the same January 2027 deadline will not create the same operational challenge for every provider.
The Observatory brings together more than 30,000 care-related locations with service model, provider scale and estate characteristics alongside Ofcom-derived fixed-connectivity context, gigabit availability, basic-connectivity indicators, mobile-network context, DSPT evidence and wider operational intelligence.
The important insight is not that one part of the sector is “connected” and another is “not connected.”
The picture is more nuanced.
Within the Observatory, individual locations can sit in materially different infrastructure contexts: some records indicate strong gigabit and multi-network availability, while others show evidence of a more constrained fixed-connectivity environment.
That does not tell Care Circle Network which broadband package a particular provider has purchased.
It does not confirm that a specific care home retains analogue equipment.
And an availability measure cannot tell us exactly how mobile or Wi-Fi connectivity performs inside every room of a building.
Those are precisely the distinctions the Observatory’s governance framework preserves: Ofcom information is used as availability context rather than evidence of installed service, while current supplier, contract and technology positions require direct provider qualification.
What the intelligence does tell us is strategically more important.
Adult social care is moving towards one digital future from very different infrastructure starting points.
For one care home, the remaining switchover work may be comparatively straightforward.
For another, the more important question may be whether several care-critical functions have become dependent on one fixed connection.
For a multi-site group, the issue may be inconsistency: twenty locations migrated successfully and one exception hidden inside an older property.
For domiciliary care, resilience increasingly moves away from the branch office and into a workforce operating across hundreds of private homes and multiple mobile-network environments.
That is why digital readiness should be understood in the context of the service rather than reduced to a national yes-or-no status.
Home care has a different last-mile problem
Residential care concentrates infrastructure in one identifiable building.
Domiciliary care disperses it across the community.
A home-care provider may have excellent connectivity at its office while having very limited influence over the communications environment in which care is actually delivered.
Each person’s home may have a different broadband provider, mobile-network environment, power-resilience arrangement and telecare supplier.
The telecare contract may sit with the council.
The phone account may be managed by a family member.
The monitoring centre may be operated by another organisation.
The home-care worker arrives in the middle of that chain without owning most of it.
The provider therefore cannot solve every connectivity problem.
It does need staff who can recognise when something has changed.
A worker may be the first person to notice that a pendant no longer appears to connect, an older person is confused by the new landline arrangement, an alarm behaves differently or an emergency-call device has become unreliable.
The provider needs a clear escalation pathway for those observations.
That is an important part of digital continuity that can be missed when the switchover is treated only as infrastructure migration.
Supported living exposes the ownership problem
Supported living and some extra-care environments create another layer of complexity because the care provider may not control the building infrastructure.
The landlord or housing association may be responsible for broadband, lift systems or communal alarms.
The telecare arrangement may sit with the local authority.
The care provider may operate the support.
A specialist contractor may maintain the equipment.
The resident may hold the telephone contract.
The telecommunications company may know only the account holder.
Everyone owns one part of the chain.
Nobody necessarily owns the outcome.
The provider does not need to assume every responsibility.
It needs enough assurance to know that the environment in which it provides regulated care remains dependable.
This is a broader governance principle that should survive beyond the PSTN project:
Where care depends on infrastructure owned by several organisations, somebody still needs an end-to-end view of the risk.
Migration completion is not the same as digital resilience
The switchover is sometimes approached as a project with a finish line.
Identify legacy lines.
Migrate them.
Close the project.
But the organisation emerging on the other side will have a fundamentally different dependency model.
Voice may rely on internet connectivity.
Care records already rely on cloud access.
eMAR may rely on mobile devices.
Alarms may use IP or mobile networks.
Telecare may become increasingly digital.
Building systems may be remotely monitored.
Connectivity stops being a supporting office service and becomes part of care infrastructure.
That means the final migration should trigger a more strategic review:
How many critical services now depend on fixed broadband?
Which can move to mobile if fixed connectivity fails?
Which mobile network?
Do two apparently different backup services share the same physical infrastructure?
Which services stop during a local power cut?
Which can operate locally even when the internet disappears?
Who notices the failure first?
Who owns recovery?
These are questions about operational resilience, not telecoms procurement.
One connection can be fast without being resilient
A 1Gbps fibre connection can be excellent infrastructure.
It can also remain a single connection.
Care providers have understandably focused on speed because digital adoption required enough capacity for cloud services, devices and modern applications.
The next conversation is about failure architecture.
If the care record, eMAR, digital phones, building access and telecare management all ultimately rely on one internet circuit, the service may be highly capable during normal operation and unusually exposed during one outage.
The answer is not necessarily purchasing two of everything.
Resilience must remain proportionate to the service and risk.
But leaders should at least understand the concentration.
A backup route that uses another router but ultimately travels through the same network may offer less resilience than assumed.
A mobile backup may be excellent if coverage is reliable, devices are configured correctly and staff know how to use it.
It may be ineffective where indoor coverage is weak.
The important word is therefore tested.
Not theoretically available.
Not shown in the supplier brochure.
Tested in the building, under conditions that resemble the failure it is intended to solve.
Digital migration can expose wider infrastructure weaknesses
This is why the January 2027 deadline should be seen as an opportunity as well as a risk.
A good migration project forces providers to map equipment and dependencies that may otherwise remain invisible.
Once that work is done properly, the resulting intelligence can strengthen far more than telephony.
The provider now has a clearer view of:
- communications services;
- care technology;
- power dependencies;
- supplier relationships;
- building systems;
- connectivity;
- and continuity requirements.
That information can support decisions about cyber resilience, digital care records, eMAR, telecare, nurse call, sensor technology and future digital procurement.
The best possible outcome from the PSTN retirement is therefore not simply:
we changed the telephone lines.
It is:
we now understand the infrastructure supporting our digital care model much better than we did before.
CQC makes the continuity connection increasingly explicit
The regulatory direction reinforces this wider view.
CQC’s current registration requirements for care homes require a business-continuity plan showing how the service will keep operating during and after serious disruption. Its guidance specifically identifies risks including power loss, IT-system failure and cyberattack among the scenarios providers should plan for.
The PSTN deadline may not appear as a separate CQC quality statement.
But the underlying expectation is clear.
A provider needs to understand and manage infrastructure failures capable of interrupting safe care.
That is why a connectivity failure should not live solely inside an IT incident log.
If the consequence could affect alarms, emergency communication, access to information or the ability to deliver support, it belongs within the service’s wider safety and continuity governance.
What senior leaders need to know now
At this late stage, a board paper saying “digital switchover 95% complete” may provide less assurance than it appears.
The five per cent remaining could contain the hardest risks.
Senior leaders need to understand the exceptions.
They should know where migration is unresolved, which devices have not been tested, which landlords or third parties have not supplied assurance and which sites have unclear backup arrangements.
They need to understand where the organisation is relying on assumptions such as:
“the landlord is dealing with it,”
“the alarm company says it is compatible,”
or
“we have mobile backup.”
Each of those statements may be perfectly true.
The governance question is what evidence sits underneath it.
The strongest assurance is not a percentage-complete measure.
It is being able to explain the unresolved dependencies and when each one will be proven safe.
Procurement now needs a failure conversation
Connectivity contracts have traditionally been bought around four familiar questions:
How fast?
How much?
How long is the contract?
How quickly does support answer?
Care providers increasingly need a fifth:
What happens when it fails?
The answer should examine recovery time, support coverage, failover, power, escalation and the operational arrangements surrounding care-critical systems.
Providers should also ask what happens outside office hours.
A connectivity supplier supporting an ordinary business can reasonably organise many activities around the working day.
A care home cannot.
Failure at 3am can matter just as much as failure at 3pm.
This is where connectivity procurement becomes much closer to resilience procurement.
The cheapest circuit is not automatically poor value.
The most expensive one is not automatically resilient.
What matters is whether the architecture, support and recovery arrangements match the consequence of failure.
The final test should be operational, not contractual
Before January, every remaining care-critical migration should eventually reach a practical question:
What happens when we deliberately test it?
A useful exercise is not necessarily complicated.
Activate the alarm.
Confirm the receiving centre sees it.
Test the lift communication.
Test during a simulated fixed-line failure where possible.
Confirm who receives the response.
Confirm the battery arrangement.
Confirm staff know what failure looks like.
Confirm the escalation contacts actually work.
Record the result.
Then test it again following material system changes.
This changes resilience from something the provider believes into something it can evidence.
And that is increasingly where modern care governance needs to move.
Five months to go
The approaching deadline should create urgency.
It should not create panic.
Modernising the UK’s telecoms infrastructure is necessary. Government notes that the ageing PSTN has reached the end of its serviceable life, with spare parts increasingly unavailable and the legacy network itself becoming less reliable.
Digital infrastructure also creates enormous opportunities for adult social care.
More connected telecare.
Better remote monitoring.
Cloud communications.
Faster sharing of information.
Greater flexibility.
And new forms of technology-enabled independence.
The answer is not to protect analogue technology indefinitely because it is familiar.
It is to make the new digital environment more dependable than the one it replaces.
Government, Ofcom and the telecommunications industry have strengthened the protections surrounding vulnerable people and telecare users. The final responsibility inside a care service is now to understand what remains.
Find the hidden dependency.
Understand the care function behind it.
Know who owns the migration.
Test the complete pathway.
Understand its power requirements.
Know the backup route.
And do not close the issue simply because the telephone works.
Because the last analogue risk in care is not really the old copper line.
It is the service nobody realised was still depending on it.
January 2027 should therefore be understood as more than the date an old network disappears.
It is a care-continuity deadline.
And the providers best prepared for it will not simply be those that have replaced their telephone lines.
They will be those that understand what their modern care operation is now connected to—and what happens when that connection is no longer there.
Frequently Asked Questions
When is the analogue telephone network being retired?
The telecommunications industry is retiring the PSTN, with PSTN-reliant landlines and other devices needing to be fully upgraded by January 2027.
Why does this matter to a care provider if its office phones have already been upgraded?
Because equipment other than telephones can use legacy connectivity. Government specifically identifies alarms, telecare, door-entry systems, lifts, intercoms and other business equipment as potentially affected.
Are there additional safeguards for telecare users?
Yes. Network operators signing the government’s 2026 charter have committed not to migrate known telecare users without confirmation that a compatible and functioning solution is available, while communications providers operate additional engagement protections for vulnerable and telecare customers.
Does a digital landline work during a power cut?
Digital voice usually depends on powered local equipment. Ofcom requires communications providers to provide at least one hour of power resilience where consumers rely on the landline to call emergency services, but care providers should assess separately what their full range of care-critical systems requires.
Is faster broadband enough to make a care service resilient?
No. Speed and resilience are different characteristics. Resilience also depends on network architecture, power, failover, supplier support, mobile availability and whether critical services have been tested under realistic failure conditions. Ofcom’s latest resilience guidance emphasises availability, architecture and operational measures alongside network performance.
What is the most useful action before the January deadline?
The strongest final assurance is an end-to-end review of every care-critical service that may depend on legacy connectivity, followed by practical testing of the migrated solution and its behaviour during foreseeable failure.
Care Circle Network Intelligence Insight
This feature has been informed by Care Circle Network’s Provider Intelligence Observatory, our sector-wide intelligence capability bringing together provider structure, service model, estate evidence, connectivity context, DSPT evidence and wider operational indicators across more than 30,000 care-related locations. Connectivity availability does not confirm the specific service installed at an individual location, and current supplier, contractual and technology positions require direct qualification.
Editorial sources
This feature has been prepared using the latest available UK guidance and evidence from the Department of Health and Social Care and Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s Telecare National Action Plan; the March and July 2026 Fixed Telecoms Modernisation safeguards; Ofcom’s June 2026 Network and Service Resilience Guidance and vulnerable-customer work; CQC’s current care-home business-continuity requirements; and Care Circle Network’s Provider Intelligence Observatory.
