For more than a century the telephone exchange has formed the backbone of our telecommunications system. A vast array of more than 5,500 mostly nondescript buildings sit unnoticed on city, town or village streets, and quietly link up more than 254 million kilometres of cables and wires – keeping people in the UK connected to each other and the rest of the world.
Since the first telephone exchange was established in London in 1879 with just eight subscribers, these anonymous looking buildings have spread the length and breadth of the UK – from the smallest on the remote Shetland Isle of Papa Stour, with just 14 homes, to the largest in Oldham, Manchester, serving more than 45,000.
But the recent explosive growth in new digital fibre based services means the majority of these iconic communication hubs will soon route their last ever call.
The advent of tiny but powerful microprocessors and glass fibres, thinner than the width of a human hair, only need a tiny fraction of the space taken up by miles of copper wires and bulky racks of switching machinery to run the old copper based phone network or Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
This seismic shift means that today we’re able to provide fibre broadband services to the entire country from just 1,000 ‘super digital exchanges’ or Openreach Handover Points (OHPs).
Sadly, this spells the beginning of the end for the remaining 4,600 exchanges used to support traditional copper based phone and broadband voice services. And these copper customers are dwindling fast as people migrate to faster more efficient fibre
Openreach is now consulting with its communication provider (CP) customers – like Sky, Vodafone, TalkTalk and BT, who use our network to connect their own customers – about how to close these ‘legacy’ exchanges over the next decade or so.
This will be a major undertaking with several million services to be migrated, and the importance of ensuring vulnerable customers and the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure providers are protected along the way. So we’re planning it in stages – with the first 103 exchanges to close by December 2030. These have some of the highest running costs so there’s a clear advantage in targeting them first. Most of the remaining 4,500 exchanges will likely follow in the early 2030s.
Press release by Richard Allwood, Chief Stragey Officer, Openreach – 26 June 2023.