Openreach Exchange Closure Pilots – The Blue Print/Playbook

Openreach facilitated by the OTA have over the last 18 months been holding Industry Working Groups and BI lateral’s with all the large CP’s in the UK (Fixed/Mobile & Altnet) who use their services and will be affected by their Exchange Closure Programme.

The purpose of these sessions has been to agree the engineering, proposition and commercial changes necessary in addition to their standard product portfolio to facilitate successful migrations.

After a robust set of session’s, OR has published its 3rd revision of the Blueprint in the last 6 weeks which the CP’s are due to start piloting in anger in the coming months, many partners and end customers are already aware of the need to close Deddington/Ballyclare and Kenton Road by the end of November 25 and further 105 exchanges in 4 tranches up to 2030 (12,20,31, 42)– these form the pilot testing phase, before nearly 4k exchanges closures between 2030-35 (OR’s current plan).

In parallel, the All IP closure plan, copper retirement, (end date Jan 27 currently) is gathering momentum, most standard customers should be migrated by the end of the year, leaving the complex/vulnerable to be completed by the 2027 date.

As well as leveraging the standard products and features and BAU engineering journeys, there are also a set of bespoke complex engineering, support and commercial approaches for the Complex/Critical CNI bases and Ethernet services.

There are also a number of industry pilots/trials ongoing in parallel that if successful will additionally help this process and include: Hypercare, CM150 chassis moves, bespoke survey etc.

How we help

Acuity Insight provides impartial advsory to help you make informed choices. It’s collective of industry experts and partner organisations can enable you to develop coherent deliverable plans and deliver successful transformations.

Partners such as sString has access to resources who have been part of this process and understand the complex juggling act of moving these services (and multi services) successfully to the agreed closure dates in a safe and secure way for single site and complex national customer networks.

These changes also have direct impacts on a Partner/CP’s systems, operational processes and billing/commercial approaches – again we have resources who have experience of these changes and their implications.