What actually replaces the landline for a small UK business

If you run a small UK business, you've probably had the letter telling you the landline is going. What the letter leaves out is the part you actually need: replace it with what, exactly. "Get VoIP" is true and useless at the same time, because VoIP isn't a product. It's the plumbing under a dozen genuinely different products, and picking the wrong one is easy to do and expensive to undo.

I've sold and installed these systems since 2012, and since 2015 at circle.cloud, the UK telecoms company I started that installs and supports phone systems for small businesses. The 2027 switch-off itself and what VoIP actually means are written up separately. This is the decision after that.

The short answer: what replaces a business landline in the UK is a calling service that runs over your broadband, with a proper business number, call handling and recording on an app and usually a desk phone. The other routes are a calling licence on software you already run, a PBX you run yourself, a big enterprise platform, or mobiles only.

Two ways to sell you a phone system

There are two ways to sell a phone system: resell someone else's, or build your own. Most of the UK market does the first, and circle.cloud has done it for years, with PBXware among the platforms. It works. It also means the product wasn't designed for your customer, and anyone else can sell the same thing next week. That's why I started We UC in 2021 to build Olatti and own what we sell, on the conviction that the more of the stack you control, the better and usually cheaper the service gets. The reference point was OpenPhone in the US, which does a lot well but doesn't support desk phones (it's built on Twilio) and isn't available in the UK. Underneath every category below sits the same question: who actually built the thing you're about to depend on.

What are the real options?

There isn't one category. There are five, and they suit different businesses for different reasons.

A cloud business phone system. The direct, purpose-built replacement: a dedicated app or service that gives your team a proper business number, call handling and (usually) recording, running over your internet connection instead of a copper line. This is what most people mean when they say "get VoIP", and for a team whose main job is answering and making calls, it's normally the right category to start in.

Calling bolted onto software you already have. If your business already lives inside Microsoft 365, adding a calling licence to Teams turns your existing tenant into a phone system rather than standing up a separate one. It's a real option, not a compromise, if your team is already deep in that world. It's also a genuinely different thing to buy than a purpose-built phone system, not the same thing with a different badge. The specifics are in Olatti vs Microsoft Teams Phone.

A self-hosted or provider-hosted PBX. Products like 3CX sit here: you're buying a phone system you (or your IT provider) run and configure yourselves, rather than a fully managed service. It suits a business with the appetite and in-house skill to run its own kit, and it can undercut per-seat pricing at the right call volume. It suits fewer businesses than it used to, because managing infrastructure is exactly the job most small teams are trying to get rid of. If you're running one of these off ISDN today, see what replaces ISDN specifically: a SIP trunk can keep the system you've already built.

A large, established unified-communications provider. RingCentral and its peers sell deep, enterprise-grade platforms with contact-centre add-ons, wide device support and features built up over two decades. That depth is real, and for a business that genuinely needs it, that's the right reason to pay for it. For a five-to-fifty-person team, it's often more system than the job requires, priced accordingly.

Just moving everyone onto mobiles. This isn't a phone system at all, it's the absence of one, and it's worth naming because a lot of small businesses drift into it rather than decide on it. Calls happen, but there's no shared number, no shared record of who said what to a client, and no way to hand a call to a colleague without giving out someone's personal mobile number. It solves the switch-off in the narrowest sense and starts a slower problem in its place.

What actually decides it?

The category matters less than four questions, answered for your team rather than in the abstract.

• Does everyone need to be reachable, or does a shared line need to be answered? A founder who's mostly on the road needs a number that follows them. A front desk needs a line anyone free can pick up. These aren't the same problem, and the right system for one can be the wrong one for the other.
• What do you already run, and does that pull you toward an answer? Deep in Microsoft 365 pulls toward Teams Phone. Nothing you're tied to pulls the decision back open.
• Who's going to run it day to day? A self-hosted system needs someone willing to own it. A managed one needs nobody to.
• What happens to a call after it ends? Whether it's searchable, who can find it, and where the recording actually lives are real differences between products, not fine print.

None of these has a universally right answer. They rule categories in or out for your team, which is most of the decision.

Where Olatti fits

I'm obviously not neutral, so I'll say plainly where we sit. Olatti is the first category: one app, and a desk phone if you want one, built as the product itself rather than added onto something else, by the team that owns the stack under it. Your existing number can usually port across. Call recording is available across plans, while transcription, summaries and search depend on the plan you choose, and reaching a colleague is a keystroke rather than a menu. Voice, transcription and summaries run on our own UK infrastructure rather than a third-party AI vendor's, which matters if that fourth question above is one of yours. If your business records calls, be transparent with callers and document your lawful basis and retention policy. That's the ICO's guidance, not legal advice from me.

It won't be the right answer for every team on this list. If you're standardised on Microsoft 365 end to end, or you need contact-centre depth at real scale, or you want to run your own kit, the honest answer might be one of the others. The feature-by-feature differences are in our comparison hub, including the Microsoft 365 route, so you can check the details rather than take my word for either side.

What I'd push back on is the mobiles-and-hope option, picked out of switch-off panic. It's the one path on this list that solves this year's problem and starts next year's.

The line is going either way. Whatever replaces it should be something you chose, not something you were handed. If you'd like to see whether Olatti is that for your team, join the waitlist and I'll bring you in early.