These locations span over 900,000 premises where the company intends to phase out traditional copper-based phone and broadband services, encouraging customers to transition to digital services via a full fibre connection.
Meanwhile, the company is giving telecom providers like BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone, which operate on its network, a year's notice that it will stop selling legacy analogue products in areas where full fibre is available to the majority (over 75%) of premises in these new exchange locations.
The stop sell policy is activated when 75% of premises connected to a specific exchange can access full fibre.
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At that point, customers looking to switch, upgrade, or modify their broadband or phone service will be required to adopt a digital service delivered over Openreach’s new full fibre network.
So far, stop sell rules have been implemented in 748 exchanges, covering more than six million premises.
In those areas, where full fibre is available to the majority of premises, new copper products are no longer sold.
An additional 41 exchanges, covering 292,000 premises, are set to go live with stop sell next month, the company revealed.
Openreach’s managed customer migrations manager, James Lilley, stated, “We’re moving to a digital world and Openreach is helping with that transformation by rolling out ultrafast, ultra-reliable, and future-proofed digital full fibre across the UK.
“This game-changing technology will become the backbone of our economy for decades to come, supporting every aspect of our public services, businesses, industries, and daily lives.
“Already, our full fibre network is available to more than 15 million homes and businesses, with more than five million premises currently taking a service.”
He added: “Taking advantage of the progress of our full fibre build and encouraging people to upgrade where a majority can access our new network is the right thing to do as it makes no sense, both operationally and commercially, to keep the old copper network and our new fibre network running side by side.
“As copper’s ability to support modern communications declines, the immediate focus is getting people onto newer, future-proofed technologies."
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