Openreach aims to close 100 phone exchanges by 2030

Closing of telephone exchanges is a long term thing, and the PSTN switch-off and full fibre roll-outs are the immediate and obvious signs of the long term plans Openreach have.

The Openreach telephone exchange footprint is currently around 5,500 exchanges where copper services, LLU and some fibre services such as leased lines are run from. By 2030 as part of a much larger plan Openreach is looking to close 103 of these after an initial trial of five exchanges in the 2024 to 2025 period.

For those using an Openreach part fibre or full fibre service nothing is going to change, as the fibre from the cabinet or your property already runs to a handover exchange and will not enter the local exchange building. This is why the PSTN switch off is crucial i.e. this is the main service that millions use that still needs the old exchange building. For those worrying this will make their service less reliable, the existing aggregation of fibre and voice services into the larger exchanges means that we are already as reliant on these handover exchanges.

There is a lot of work to complete before closing an exchange, hence why the list of 103 exchanges has a five year window to be actioned. The benefit for Openreach is that they can reduce the number of leases they pay, and maintenance can be streamlined. The eventual fate of the actual exchange buildings will depend on the freeholder, but with 99% of the exchanges being in central locations of towns and villages, we expect there to be a wave of change of use planning applications and homes or apartments to replace them. Repurposing the sites will be a little more complex than just bulldozing the old, invariably shabby buildings to avoid damage to the underground trunk network that may pass under the land.

For the five exchanges in the initial trial the FTTP stats are

• • Deddington (Oxfordshire): 99% FTTP coverage March 2022, 26th June 2023 98.3% FTTP coverage
  • Kenton Road (London): 93% FTTP coverage March 2022, 26th June 2023 96.2% FTTP coverage
  • Carrickfergus (NI): 98% FTTP coverage March 2022, 26th June 2023 96.2% FTTP coverage
  • Ballyclare (NI): 90% FTTP coverage March 2022, 26th June 2023 97.6% FTTP coverage
  • Glengormley (NI): 99% FTTP coverage March 2022, 26th June 2023 97% FTTP coverage

The March 2022 FTTP coverage figures are from estimates supplied by Openreach in March 2022, and we have added our own analysis of the footprints as 26th June 2023. Those where our data is higher suggests roll-outs continue, and in two Northern Ireland exchanges where it is lower, we don’t know why as earlier in June we did a massive catch-up and should not be missing anything significant. The variation is probably less than the figures suggest as getting exact property counts is very difficult even when working at the address/UPRN level and while we are confident Openreach don’t do this, we believe a good number of FTTP networks seem to include PO Boxes in their premises passed data.

For the 103 exchanges where the exchange building is set to be vacated by 2030 the FTTP statistics that we have are:

As the list shows current levels of FTTP coverage from Openreach vary widely, but with 7 years to the 2030 target there is lots of time to build a lot more FTTP. There is no absolute requirement for 100% FTTP as the FTTC/VDSL2 service can run without the current local exchange. For example Haxley may only have 11% FTTP coverage but once you include VDSL2 the Openreach coverage rises to 98%, so around 40 old pure copper lines that need conversion work.

Where things get more confusing is if an alt-net is using one of the smaller exchanges to house equipment, in theory the sensible ones will have planned for exchange closures in their roll-out and be running the active hardware in an exchange that is set to remain operational post 2030 but there will be those caught out.