Openreach To Start Telephone Exchange Closure Process

Openreach continues its plan to reduce the number of telephone exchanges in the UK, as buildings are made redundant amid the full fibre deployment across the country.

Openreach has updated its ‘Exchange Exit Programme‘ of 105 telephone exchanges it plans to exit, as the carrier seeks to consolidate its stock of physical buildings, as it changes its telephone network and retires copper-based lines (or the PSTN network).

This is part of BT and Openreach’s move towards a full fibre model known as Fibre to the Premise (FTTP), which requires substantially fewer telephone exchanges to support.

Exchange closures

It was back in December 2020 when Openreach had first consulted on plans to close down thousands of legacy local telephone exchanges.

The carrier has now has placed a “stop sell” for communication providers on 105 exchanges by 2030.

Historically Openreach utilised approximately 5,600 telephone exchanges located in most cities, towns and villages, in order to support its traditional copper-based network that spans the UK.

But the advent of fibre has drastically reduced the need for these exchanges, with only roughly 1,000 ‘super exchanges’ required to manage the fibre network (both FTTC and FTTP).

Legacy buildings

Telephone exchanges are often nondescript buildings that often occupy valuable real estate and land.

Some of these exchanges can be very small indeed (think garden shed), but some of them can be large buildings, as historically they were required to house lots of bulky telecoms equipment back in the day.

Often this equipment nowadays requires a fraction of the space, and certainly a tour of London telephone exchange by Silicon UK many years ago, revealed that large telephone exchanges have plenty of empty space, with only a tiny portion of room being used by modern equipment.

In November 2021 Openreach announced a pilot closure of five exchange areas in the UK.