Smart Working Case Study

Established in 1993, Atlas Fire & Security are a passionate and customer-focused organisation, based in Birkenhead. The team at Atlas are aware of the upcoming challenges posed by the UK’s All IP upgrade project. Recently, Managing Director, John Piggott, saw first-hand how end-users will be impacted by these changes.

“In the first week of October 2021, I received a letter from BT to advise that they would be upgrading my home landline to the new digital service. I was also aware that my local exchange was going into its ‘stop-sell’ phase from 13th October, meaning that any changes to my service would automatically move to IP as older options would no longer be available.”

Like many others, John presumed the switchover would be done within the next 12 months, following the ‘stop-sell’ phase beginning and that he would be given a good notice period of the upgrade date. Ultimately, this didn’t happen.

“I then received an email from BT on the 19th October (6 days after the stop-sell phase began) to advise me that the upgrade to my service would happen just 7 days later, on 26th October. Sure enough, this all went ahead as planned, and from this date, my PSTN service was switched off and replaced with IP.”

Luckily for John, he was aware of the implications of this switch and was able to plan for his own alarm system to be upgraded to the latest 4G solution from CSL. But many end-users will not be aware that this change impacts their alarm system and may not notify their installer company ahead of the change. This could cause lots of issues for Installers, with emergency callouts requested as the system goes into fail.

“Having now seen for myself how home and business owners will be impacted by these changes, we are proactively encouraging all our customers to have their systems upgraded. Not only does this futureproof their system and allow us to provide them with a better service, but it also avoids any potential issues caused by the All IP switchover”.

For more information on the latest exchanges impacted by All IP, please click here.