Earlier this year, we paused the rollout of Digital Voice: BT’s new home phone service whereby calls are made over our broadband network, rather than the analogue network which has existed for more than 40 years.

Landlines aren’t going away. They’re simply being upgraded from an increasingly obsolete technology to one that will bring long-term benefits, including crystal-clear calls and screening out scam calls, and a service fit for the future.

Pausing has enabled us to listen to our customers’ concerns about the impact of this switch and their specific needs to ensure we have the right solutions available when we resume the rollout.

Since then, we’ve appointed a Programme Director for our Consumer migrations, Lucy Baker, to lead this major programme and, critically, to ensure we meet customers’ needs. Lucy’s experience in communication projects essential to public safety means she is the right person for the job.

Drawing on her customer engagement experience for the Emergency Services Network, Lucy founded the Digital Voice Advisory Group. It brings together charities and representative groups to better understand how the switch will affect different customers.

This group of stakeholders has been indispensable in helping to shape our plans for restarting the customer switch to digital later in 2023. Specifically, we’ve consulted them on how best to raise awareness among customers so they understand the need to switch, what they need to do, and how to speak to us about any concerns.

We’ve been testing this approach with customers in Salisbury and Mildenhall, among the first locations to benefit from the changeover to digital phone lines, through our pilot schemes. Lucy has taken her team and their information bus into town to speak directly to customers, their friends and family who wanted to find out more about the switch and ask questions. This has been a great success and we’ll be taking this approach when we restart the rollout.

We want to reassure customers that when we do restart, likely in Spring 2023, we will contact them ahead of time and give them the opportunity to raise any concerns. And we will have the solutions in place to provide customers with confidence in their new home phone service. These include:

• Hybrid phones that can switch to a mobile network;
• Providing in-home ‘mobile landlines’ for people without broadband;
• Expanding 4G coverage to over 2,000 rural areas through the Shared Rural Network, 1,300 of which we have already built or upgraded since March 2020;
• Proactively engaging related industries, such as healthcare pendant providers to support the most vulnerable customers with their needs.

The switch from analogue to digital phone lines is one of many necessary upgrades to the UK’s infrastructure. This, alongside the once-in-a-generation upgrade to a new Full Fibre network, will change how we connect our homes and businesses, and help secure the UK’s position as one of the most advanced digital economies globally.

We’re working hard to upgrade our customers in the smoothest, most efficient way possible.