Openreach Is Reprinting Every Business Card in Britain

Five months, and no extension

On 31 July, Openreach published a release containing a sentence that almost no sales director in Britain has read. Around 1.5 million lines are still running on the old copper telephone network, roughly 350,000 of them at business premises, and the switch-off date of 31 January 2027 is not moving. James Lilley, Openreach’s director of All-IP, put it plainly: the switch-off is six months away and there is no extension to the deadline.

Set that against where things stood at the start of the year. In February, Openreach counted about 2.8 million lines still to migrate, more than 500,000 of them business lines, and set out a schedule of price rises on the legacy product: 20% on 1 April, 40% on 1 July, and a further 40% on 1 October, roughly doubling the 2025 rental cost. That last increase lands in about four weeks.

So the migration is happening, and it is happening fast. The interesting question for anyone who sells for a living is not whether your company gets it done. It is what your company’s phone setup looks like on the other side, and how much of your printed material is still describing the setup on this side.

Your number is almost certainly fine. Your card might not be.

First, the reassurance, because this is where most coverage of the switch-off goes wrong and frightens people for no reason. Number portability is regulated and routine. Moving a number from a copper line to a digital service is a normal, supported process, and it is not something that quietly fails while you are looking the other way.

The thing that changes is everything around the number.

A migration is a forcing event. It is the first time in perhaps fifteen years that someone senior has been made to look at the whole telephone estate at once, with a deadline attached. Companies that go through that exercise do not put it back exactly as it was. The fax line goes, because someone finally admits nobody has sent a fax since the last office move. The second line into the warehouse goes. Three regional numbers get consolidated into one, because paying for three made sense when they sat on three physical exchanges and makes no sense at all now. Somebody looks at the 0845 number on the letterhead and asks why customers are still being charged to complain.

The one that actually costs you is the direct dial

Main switchboard numbers get protected during a migration because everybody can see them. Direct dial numbers for individual staff are the ones that get restructured, renumbered or quietly dropped, because they are an internal implementation detail right up until the moment a buyer tries one.

And direct dials are exactly what is printed on the cards your team hands out. Nobody commissions a reprint because a DDI range changed.

A dead number does not bounce

Here is the part that makes printed contact details fail so gracefully that you never notice.

A wrong email address tells you. It bounces in seconds, the message comes back with a reason attached, and every CRM worth the name flags the record. The failure is loud, dated and attributed.

A phone number that no longer routes anywhere does none of that. It rings out, or it reaches a recorded message, or it reaches whoever inherited the range. There is no bounce, no notification, no flag. The only person who finds out is the buyer who tried once, decided you were either out of business or not worth a second attempt, and rang a competitor whose number worked.

You do not experience this as a problem. You experience it as a slightly quieter quarter.

Print is a snapshot. Your company is not.

A printed card is a bet that nothing important about you will change between the day of the print run and the day the last card leaves the box. That bet has always been slightly bad, because people change roles, offices move and mobile numbers follow people out of the door. For 350,000 UK business premises specifically, over the next five months, it is a much worse bet than usual.

The real cost is not the reprint. Reprinting is cheap and everybody knows how to do it. The cost is the interval: the weeks or months in which cards already in circulation say something that is no longer true, held by people you cannot identify, and there is no mechanism by which any of them will ever find out.

That interval only closes if at least one version of your contact details is editable after the fact. A digital card is a link, a QR code and a Wallet pass that all resolve to a record you still control, so when the DDI changes in November you edit it once and the QR code on the back of the card you handed out in September starts pointing at the right number. The card in their pocket is out of date. The thing it points to is not. If you are the person whose direct line is about to be restructured by an infrastructure project you were not consulted about, get the HeyDrop app and stop depending on a print run to stay accurate.

The team version of the same problem

One person keeping their details current is a personal habit. A sales team is a different shape of problem, because the number that is about to change is not on one card, it is the same number on every card the team owns, plus their email signatures, plus the exhibition stand, plus the PDF that sales engineering sends out.

Handled centrally, that becomes one afternoon’s work rather than fifteen separate small failures. Cards are created and controlled from an admin panel, so a numbering change is applied once and everybody’s card is correct that day. Branding stays consistent, joiners and leavers are handled in the same place rather than inside a dozen personal phones, and the contacts your team collects come back in one shape, exporting to CSV or Excel as a CRM-ready record. If your team’s cards were printed before anyone in the building had heard of the switch-off, set your team up on HeyDrop.

Five things to do before 31 January

List every place your number is printed. Not just cards. Vehicle livery, the sign by the door, invoice templates, the PDF brochure, the Google Business Profile nobody has logged into in years, email signatures, the sponsorship page of a trade body website.

Port early rather than late. Porting is measured in working days, not minutes, and the queue in front of you gets longer every week that the remaining 1.5 million lines shrinks toward the deadline.

Decide your number of record before you migrate. Which single number goes on everything from now on, and what happens to the ones you are retiring. Deciding this after the migration means deciding it twice.

Treat 1 October as its own deadline. The final 40% rise on the legacy product is a cost event with a date on it, which is usually the only kind of argument that moves a migration up a priority list.

Make one channel of your contact details updateable. Whatever else stays on paper, at least one route to you should be something you can correct without a print run.

The useful thing about somebody else’s deadline

Deadlines you set yourself get moved. This one was set by an infrastructure operator, applies to everyone at once, and has a date printed on it. That makes it a rare and genuinely useful excuse to look at something most companies never audit: the fact that the primary way a stranger is meant to reach you was fixed in ink at some point in the past, and has been quietly drifting out of date ever since.

The network is being switched off in January whether or not you look. The card is the part you can still do something about.

This article and its accompanying image were generated with the assistance of AI.