With the year still distinctly new, many will be forgiven for still getting used to the fact that it is 2026 and not 2025. However, there are still good reasons to be looking towards the time when it is January 2027.
That is the date for the completion of the UK digital switchover, the point at which, with a few permitted exceptions, the transition from an analogue telecoms system to a digital one will be concluded and the analogue signal switched off. The plans were announced in 2017 and the government has been working with the telecoms industry on the project ever since.
Why Is The Digital Switchover Happening?
Many companies will have already been engaged with this process and are familiar with it. However, it is worth recalling just why this changeover is happening and what benefits business customers should expect as a result.
- Analogue services are coming to the end of their working life
- Replacement parts for the analogue network are increasingly hard to source
- The number of service incidents and lost hours of service has soared as the network has become more unreliable
- Digital services will offer better quality calls
- Digital services will include new features such as three-way calls and anonymous caller rejection
- The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system cables used for digital telephony are waterproof, making them more resistant to damage in floods or storms
Put together, what this promises is that when the switchover comes, the service will be better than before, come with new features and have greater resilience against severe weather events, an important consideration in a more capricious climate.
This all sounds good and for some, it may well be. Indeed, much of the switchover has already occurred and in some ways it is seamless. For instance, nobody has had to change their landline number.
Why Switch Telecoms Provider?
Some may wonder, therefore, why it might actually be a good idea to switch telecoms provider this year.With a year to go until the UK digital telecoms switchover is set to be completed, now could be the perfect time to consider switching your provider.
There are several possible reasons for this, which may be summarised as follows:
- You may be able to get a better price elsewhere compared to what you pay now
- Some providers may offer discounts for new customers as the switchover nears completion in a bid to gain market share
- While digital services should be better and more reliable than analogue, this does not mean nothing will ever go wrong and the standard of customer service and speed of responses to problems may vary
Quite apart from these considerations, you might have thought in the past that you would like to switch because you were unhappy with your business telecoms provider, but not know how you might be able to do this.
Now, however, our new telecoms switching service is designed to make that easy, so you can go about it with speed and convenience.
What Can Go Wrong With VoIP Telephony?
Among the issues to consider is the performance of the VoIP system that digital telephony uses. This uses internet technology to transmit voice calls in packets of data that are reassembled and turned back into sound. It all sounds ingenious and it is, but some problems can arise.
- Echo, which occurs when the voice packets do not arrive on time
- Jitter, which happens when the packets go missing or arrive in the wrong order
- Dropped calls, where the call cuts out and can create the false impression that whoever you are talking to has just hung up on you
- Choppy audio
These are just some of the problems that VoIP can encounter and although these are quite uncommon, fixing them requires some technical expertise. Some companies may have that in-house, but many will not and that is when you will be reliant on your provider to address the problem.
As with any other time that you need an engineer to fix a utility service, the test is partly whether they provide a solution at the time, but also whether what they put in place lasts or is prone to recurrence. If they fall short, are slow to send an engineer, or provide poor communication, you may feel highly dissatisfied and want to take your custom elsewhere.
With a year to go, there is still much to do to complete the switchover, although a lot has already been completed. Indeed, if you have already had a digital VoIP system installed, you may have experienced for yourself issues such as echo, jitter and dropped calls.
Some may be perfectly happy with the new digital service, but if you are not, our switching service is just what you need and you don’t have to wait until January 2027 to use it.
