Openreach used 2021 to confirm that a first wave of telephone exchanges across Greater Manchester would stop selling new ISDN lines altogether, one of the early, concrete steps in the industry-wide move away from traditional copper telephony.
For businesses still running ISDN, the announcement was a practical prompt rather than an emergency: existing lines kept working, but any new installation or expansion in an affected exchange area had to be built on IP-based technology instead.
Our advice at the time was the same advice we still give today — get ahead of a forced migration rather than reacting to one. Moving to a hosted VoIP system on your own timeline means you can plan training, number porting and hardware rollout properly, rather than scrambling when an exchange finally switches off.