I am also struggling with having to decide what to do with a landline that I would prefer to keep. For the first time in my life I had to tell a BT agent to stop lying to me by saying the copper connections are going away by Jan 2027 and there is no choice but to pay to get broadband on a new fibre connection to keep my phone line.
When I eventually got a word in while he was telling me how bad I was for calling him a liar and that was not helping and how wrong I was I was able
to point out that I have two relatives on the same exchange who have been offered a conversion to DV by connecting their copper line at the exchange.
He then went away (I could not tell if that was some bad customer cooling off thing) and came back with a different message, yes the copper to the home still exisits and there is a product but it is for special people.
He called it Home Phone Standard but I since learned other terminology such as PDPL and OpenReach SOTAP, but these are transitional and I think to 2030 but then many dates have come and gone.
BT do have information on this...
But BT call handlers are not going to mention this to you in a rush to tell you that you have to take broadband (which coudl be the same price) to keep the phone service. The exception might be if you have some sort of home alarm and they are aware of that.
BT is broadly correct, though. Digital Voice is the mainstream replacement product for their residential PSTN / "analogue" landline and this is delivered over BT or EE broadband. It is the only product that new customers can have and it is still the expected replacement product for most existing customers.
PDPL is only available to existing PSTN customers who do not have broadband on that same line. If your relatives are in that position, that's why they've been offered it. The page you've linked to describes PDPL, which BT call "Home Phone Standard" for marketing reasons (note that it says the migration is done remotely).
Its hard to understand what your circumstances are from what you have written but it sounds like you have a phone service with BT and broadband with someone else. If that is true, BT is right to say they have nothing to offer you without swapping over to them.
BT's landline only pricing is hilariously obscene such that it probably is cheaper to take broadband and DV anyway.
That must be what I was switched to, a year or so ago. The only consequences for me were being without the line for a day (insignificant) and, as mentioned in your quote, having to add the area code to the local numbers in my phone memories. Everything still works as before, including two hard-wired extensions, and on one of those, a forty year old corded phone.
How long this arrangement will last I don't know, but so far so good.
Likely to be some time in the 2030s, or unless you move home or provider in the meantime. At some point Openreach wants to close the exchange buildings and that will mean the final end to these services.
One key difference between DV and PDPL is that the PDPL equipment can handle pulse dialing. Though, as I say above, the price is not very competitive. You shouldn't have been without service for a day though, it's meant to be more like minutes as the line is physically moved to the new equipment.
