Ofcom’s Connected Nations 2025: What It Means for Telecare Resilience

For telecare equipment manufacturers, local authorities and monitoring centres, the implications are significant. Home broadband delivers speed – but for life-safety applications, it introduces dependencies and failure points that resilient DUAL-CORE multi-network mobile connectivity is specifically designed to eliminate. 

Ensuring that vulnerable customers are protected through this transition is paramount. Highlighted this week by a £23.8m fine imposed by UK communications watchdog Ofcom on Virgin Media. A heavy penalty, that reflected the significance and duration of the breach, and the number of vulnerable telecare users left “at a direct risk of harm”.  

Legacy landlines are in steep decline. Fewer than one fifth of residential landline connections now run on the old PSTN, down from 5.2 million customers to just 3.2 million in a single year. In that same period, 1.9 million households migrated to VoIP digital lines, and over a million households went broadband-only – cancelling their landline altogether. 

That last point matters most. In broadband-only homes, traditional voice-based telecare alarms have no dial tone to use – and IP-based alternatives route through the home broadband router, inheriting all its vulnerabilities. 

Ofcom highlights Openreach’s Prove Telecare service, launched in September 2025, to help verify that telecare devices work safely as customers move onto digital lines. But even where digital voice is available, the telecare hub’s connection to the monitoring centre typically routes through the home broadband router – which depends on mains power and the ISP’s network, and often fails at precisely the moments when vulnerable people need to call for help. 

If a pendant alarm or fall detector is someone’s last safety net, routing it through the home router creates a single point of failure. An important point to note, is this means that both Wi-Fi and Ethernet will fail together and leave telecare users unprotected.  

The report makes one point unmistakable: mobile networks carry more traffic, across more of the UK, than ever before. 

4G from at least one operator now covers 96% of UK landmass and over 99% of premises. 5G coverage outside premises reaches 94–97% depending on confidence level, with 5G Standalone now available across 83% of areas from at least one operator. 

Monthly mobile data usage hit 1,257 petabytes, up 18% year-on-year. 5G traffic alone grew 53%. 

Ofcom’s new Map Your Mobile tool uses tighter signal thresholds to give a realistic local view. Even with these stricter criteria, 88% of the UK landmass has good outdoor coverage from at least one network. 

This is the environment Dual-Core and rSIM is designed for – a world where 4G and 5G are nearly everywhere, and the question is no longer “is there a mobile network?” but “how do we use multiple networks intelligently for resilience?” 

Ofcom explicitly notes that as 2G, 3G and PSTN are phased out, IoT connectivity is increasingly replacing those services – citing telecare, security systems and utility monitoring by name. 

There are now 27.7 million active IoT connections on UK mobile networks. The combination of LTE-M, NB-IoT and 4G/5G gives telecare designers options ranging from low-power, long-life devices to higher-bandwidth endpoints capable of richer telemetry. 

But whatever the radio technology, the connectivity path must be resilient by design. 

Full fibre now passes 78% of residential premises, and gigabit-capable networks reach 87%. For streaming, working from home and general connectivity, this is excellent progress. 

But home broadband introduces a chain of dependencies that weren’t engineered for life-critical applications. A typical broadband-connected telecare installation works like this: the telecare hub sits in the home and connects to the monitoring centre via the household’s broadband router. That router depends on mains power, the ISP’s network, and its own firmware and hardware reliability. 

When any link in that chain fails – a power cut, an ISP outage, a router reboot, a firmware update – the telecare hub loses its path to the monitoring centre. The hub itself may be working perfectly, but it cannot get the alarm through. 

A telecare hub with built-in mobile connectivity changes this entirely. The hub carries its own independent connection to the monitoring centre via cellular networks – with its own DUAL SIM or resilient rSIM® solution, its own power budget, emergency battery, and no dependency on the household router or broadband service. If the home loses power or the broadband fails, the mobile path remains available for an extended period. 

Ofcom’s report includes a programme of work on mobile RAN power resilience, acknowledging that network resilience matters for emergency calling and life safety. For telecare, the conclusion is clear: home broadband can be part of the solution, but the hub needs its own independent path. 

Against this backdrop, CSL’s approach is straightforward: build ‘gold standard’ mobile connectivity into the telecare hub itself. 

Mobile-first, not mobile-last. rSIM and Dual-SIM connects to multiple UK mobile networks, automatically selecting the best available signal. A telecare hub with Dual SIM or rSIM has its own independent path to the monitoring centre – no dependency on the household router, ISP or broadband service. 

Dual-core for true path diversity. SIM traffic can be carried over two independent mobile core environments with diverse routing. If one core has a problem, traffic moves to the other – without engineer visits or delays. 

Designed for PSTN switch-off and beyond. Dual SIM and rSIM-enabled hubs can deploy as mobile-only units where landlines are gone, or provide out-of-band backup alongside broadband-connected systems. Multi-network capability means new coverage from the Shared Rural Network and future cellular deployments benefit your installed base automatically. 

Ofcom’s findings point to three actions: 

1. Design for mobile-first resilience – assume the landline may not exist and treat home broadband as an option, not a dependency 
2. Use multi-network, dual-core connectivity as standard – for life-safety applications, single-operator or router-dependent solutions leave gaps that matter 
3. Exploit the coverage gains – use Ofcom’s Map Your Mobile data and CSL’s reach to deploy with confidence, even at the rural edge 

The infrastructure now exists to build mobile-first, dual-core telecare hubs that don’t depend on the home router. The question is whether your product and service roadmap is ready. 

This is the first in our series exploring how Ofcom’s Connected Nations 2025 findings shape the future of telecare connectivity.