BT has been accused of bullying its own customers by temporarily switching off their broadband to pressure them onto digital landlines, according to a Guardian investigation published Saturday 3 October. The practice, which campaigners say disproportionately hits older and vulnerable households, runs as telecoms companies race to move the last millions of lines off the copper network before the planned January switchover deadline.
The mechanism is perverse in its simplicity. Under the digital voice switch, known as the PSTN retirement, traditional phone lines are replaced by voice-over-internet services that ride on the broadband connection. BT’s reported tactic, in the cases the Guardian gathered, is to pause the broadband of households still holding onto an old-style line, which kills both services at once, then present the digital upgrade as the way to get connected again. Critics call that leverage, not assistance. The First Paper, summarising the reporting, noted that operators have already migrated roughly 16 to 17 million lines off the copper network, leaving a tail of holdouts that the January deadline will force one way or another.
Why do people hold out? Some households rely on equipment built around the analogue line: fall sensors, personal alarms, lift alarms in blocks of flats, and older care telephones that simply stop working when the signal becomes internet-dependent. Others distrust a service that drops in a power cut, because a copper line historically carried its own current and kept ringing through blackouts. The Digital Technology Centre’s write-up of the accusations frames the risk plainly: vulnerable users losing vital connections.
BT’s position, as relayed across the coverage, is that the pauses are meant to prevent longer-term service loss, the argument being that the line will die at switchover anyway and customers need moving before the cliff arrives rather than after. Campaigners answer that a deadline enforced by cutting the customer’s existing service mid-month is not informed consent, and that Ofcom’s own rules on vulnerable customers were written for precisely this kind of situation.
For the wider market, the episode is a stress test for the biggest infrastructure change UK telecoms has attempted in a century. Openreach’s copper retirement is meant to modernise a network whose maintenance costs are rising as skills and parts dwindle, and every provider from BT’s competitors to the resellers on its wholesale platform faces the same migration tail. How much of that tail behaves like BT’s reported cases, with broadband paused to force the issue, will shape both Ofcom’s posture and any parliamentary questions this side of January.
The uncomfortable takeaway from the Guardian’s reporting is not that a giant telecoms company is aggressive. It is that the switch has been sold to the public as an upgrade while working, at the edges, like an eviction. The copper network was not optional for the people still on it in 2026. It was the only phone they had.
