For decades, a fixed office landline was simply part of running a business.

That’s changing fast. Across the UK, sole traders and small firms are dropping traditional lines in favour of a virtual phone number — a business number that works on the mobile they already carry. Here’s what’s driving the shift.

The old network is being switched off

The timing isn’t a coincidence. The UK’s traditional copper phone network (the PSTN) is being retired, and analogue landlines are being phased out in favour of digital alternatives. For a small business, that looming deadline is a natural prompt to ask a bigger question: do we need a physical line at all?

For many, the answer is no. If your team already works from mobiles, laptops and the odd coffee shop, a desk-bound line starts to look like a cost without a purpose.

What a virtual number actually does

A virtual phone number isn’t tied to a single handset or location. Calls to your business number are simply diverted to whatever device you’re using — usually your mobile. You keep a professional presence, without the hardware.

The practical wins add up quickly:

• Work and personal calls stay separate. You hand out a business number, not your personal mobile.
• You’re reachable anywhere. Calls follow you, whether you’re on site, at home or travelling.
• No engineer, no installation. Setup takes minutes, not weeks, and there’s nothing to wire in.

Crucially, a virtual number still looks the part. You can choose a UK phone number with a local area code — an 0161 for Manchester, an 020 for London — so customers see a familiar, credible number rather than a mobile.

Professional features without the phone system

The other draw is control. Modern virtual services bundle in the kind of features that used to require an expensive on-premise phone system: call forwarding, business hours, voicemail, custom greetings and call menus, all managed from an app.

For a growing business, that means you can route calls to the right person, switch off cleanly after hours, and add numbers or users as the team expands — without a contract renegotiation or a visit from an installer.

A lower-risk way to look bigger

Cost plays a part too. Virtual numbers typically run on a straightforward monthly subscription, with no lengthy contracts and no hardware to buy. Providers like Rinkel start from a few pounds per user per month, which makes a professional setup accessible even for a one-person business.

The bigger picture is simple: as the old network winds down and work becomes more mobile, the fixed landline is quietly becoming optional. For many small UK businesses, a virtual number offers the same professional front — with a lot more freedom behind it.

MOCKSVILLE, N.C. — A North Carolina family is racing through a series of rabies vaccinations for their 4-year-old son after learning that baby goats he petted at a mobile petting zoo tested positive for the virus, part of a broader public health response now underway across the state.

Rebecca Lanning, 30, of Marion, said she received a call from her son’s aunt last Friday informing her that her son had been exposed to rabies. The family had visited a dinosaur-themed exhibit in Mocksville 13 days earlier, on Aug. 15, an event that also featured food trucks, carnival games and a petting zoo where the boy fed baby goats by hand. “I didn’t think anything of it until Friday, when his aunt called me and was like, ‘Hey, we have a situation,’” Lanning said.

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services announced Friday that three baby goats from the petting zoo had tested positive for rabies. Those animals, along with a fourth goat suspected of carrying the virus, have since been euthanized.

Lanning immediately took her son to the doctor, where he received the first two of six required doses of the rabies vaccine, a regimen known as post-exposure prophylaxis. The shots are administered after a possible exposure in an effort to stop the virus before it can take hold in the body. Once symptoms of a rabies infection begin, the disease, which attacks the brain and spinal cord, is almost always fatal. The vaccine is nearly 100% effective at preventing the disease, but only when it is administered before symptoms appear.

People can become infected with rabies through contact with the saliva of an infected animal, or through a bite or scratch. Lanning said the uncertainty of her son’s specific interactions with the goats has weighed on her heavily in the days since learning of the exposure. “My fear is that if he was feeding the goats, and he’s 4, who’s to say that he didn’t touch his mouth or eyes?” Lanning said. “I don’t want to bury my child.”

Rabies symptoms typically take weeks to months to appear after exposure, and can initially resemble the flu, including weakness, fatigue, fever and headaches. According to the North Carolina health department, people may also experience a prickling or itching sensation at the site where they were touched or bitten by an infected animal.

As of Monday, the state health department said it did not have an estimate of how many people may have been exposed to the infected goats. The animals were part of a North Carolina-based mobile petting zoo operation called Farm Adventures, which had appeared at events across the state between July 28 and Aug. 23. Beyond the Mocksville dinosaur exhibit, the goats were also brought to private gatherings, including birthday parties and a back-to-school celebration, as well as a visit to an assisted living center.

A representative for Farm Adventures did not respond to a request for comment. The company addressed the situation in a post on its Facebook page, stating that its goats, which were too young to have been vaccinated against rabies themselves, appeared to have contracted the virus after a skunk got into their enclosure. Skunks are among the animals most commonly known to carry and transmit rabies, along with bats, raccoons and foxes.

In a statement, the North Carolina health department said it is “working with local health departments and healthcare systems to make sure rabies post-exposure prophylaxis is available to anyone who needs it,” as officials work to identify and reach others who may have come into contact with the infected animals during their weeks on the road.

The incident comes amid what public health officials say is a broader increase in rabies exposures nationally in recent years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 1.4 million Americans are evaluated annually for possible rabies exposure, with about 100,000 people ultimately receiving post-exposure prophylaxis shots each year. Health officials continue to urge caution around wild and unfamiliar animals, along with prompt medical attention following any bite, scratch or direct contact with an animal’s saliva, given how critical early treatment is to preventing the disease from becoming fatal.

For years, Britain had an uncomfortable problem with its broadband infrastructure. While countries including Spain, Japan and South Korea pushed fibre deeper into their fixed networks, millions of UK homes continued to rely on copper for the final stretch of their connection.

That gap has not disappeared. But it is closing remarkably quickly.

Full-fibre broadband was available to 82% of UK homes by January 2026, according to Ofcom, up from less than a quarter just five years earlier. Gigabit-capable broadband, which also includes technologies other than full fibre, had reached 89% of homes.

The figures represent one of the fastest infrastructure transformations Britain has undertaken in recent years. They also complicate the familiar argument that the UK is simply falling behind the rest of the world.

Britain was late to the fibre race. Increasingly, however, it is becoming one of its fastest runners.

The countries Britain is still chasing

There remains a group of countries where fibre is considerably more mature.

Ofcom’s international comparison for the first quarter of 2025 put full-fibre coverage at 100% in Singapore, Japan and Spain, followed by South Korea at 99% and France at 95%. The UK stood at 77% at the time, ranking sixth among the countries compared.

Other measures tell a similar story. Across the OECD, fibre accounted for 44.6% of fixed broadband subscriptions by mid-2024, but the proportion was dramatically higher in some markets. Iceland, South Korea and Spain were among the countries where fibre represented more than 80% of fixed broadband connections.

These countries did not necessarily arrive there in the same way.

South Korea and Japan benefited from dense urban populations and began investing heavily in fibre infrastructure much earlier. Spain combined favourable deployment economics in its cities with sustained investment by competing operators. France pursued an aggressive nationwide programme that extended fibre well beyond its largest urban centres.

Britain, by contrast, spent years extracting more performance from its existing copper and cable infrastructure.

That approach was economically rational. Fibre-to-the-cabinet could provide much faster broadband without replacing the final copper connection into every property, while cable networks provided another route to higher speeds.

But it also delayed the point at which fibre would need to be built all the way to millions of individual premises.

Britain is now building at extraordinary speed

The result is an unusual position: Britain remains behind the world’s most mature fibre markets while simultaneously carrying out one of Europe’s largest fibre deployments.

Ofcom says the UK has gone from full fibre reaching less than one in four homes five years ago to more than eight in ten today. In the six months to January 2026 alone, another 1.2 million homes gained access.

Much of that acceleration has come from competition.

Openreach remains the country’s largest fixed network operator, but it is no longer building in isolation. Virgin Media O2, CityFibre and a collection of smaller alternative networks have invested heavily in their own infrastructure, sometimes building competing fibre networks in the same towns and cities.

That competition has not been painless. Some alternative network operators have struggled to convert homes passed into paying customers, while consolidation across the sector has become increasingly likely as investors scrutinise the returns generated by duplicated infrastructure.

For consumers, however, the investment boom has helped turn Britain’s fibre deficit into a rapidly shrinking one.

Geography changes the economics

International broadband rankings can obscure just how different the challenge is from one country to another.

Countries such as South Korea and Japan combine highly urbanised populations with relatively high population density, making it possible for networks to reach large numbers of households efficiently. Spain has also benefited from dense cities and extensive fibre investment, helping it become one of Europe’s most mature fibre markets.

The challenge looks different in larger and more sparsely populated countries. Canada and Australia, for example, must connect populations spread across enormous geographic areas, while the United States combines dense metropolitan markets with vast rural regions where the economics of fixed infrastructure can be considerably more difficult.

“Fibre coverage is difficult to compare between countries without considering the geography behind the numbers,” says Tomas Novosad of Home Internet Plans. “Population density, the distance between communities and the infrastructure already in place can dramatically change the economics of a fibre rollout. Reaching another million premises in one country may require a very different level of investment than reaching the same number somewhere else.”

Britain sits in a comparatively favourable position. Its relatively high population density and compact geography allow network operators to reach large numbers of premises without covering the distances required in countries such as Canada or Australia.

That advantage becomes less significant, however, as coverage approaches universality. The homes left behind tend to be precisely those that are most difficult and expensive to connect.

The last homes are the hardest

This is where Britain’s fibre story enters its next and potentially more difficult stage.

Ofcom forecasts that full-fibre networks could reach 96% of UK premises by 2027 if operators complete their planned deployments.

Reaching the remaining premises is another matter.

Commercial networks naturally prioritise areas where the cost of construction can be justified by the number of potential customers. Remote homes, isolated communities and difficult terrain can produce precisely the opposite equation: substantial construction costs for relatively few connections.

That is why public programmes such as Project Gigabit remain important even as commercial fibre coverage approaches nationwide levels. The challenge is increasingly not bringing faster broadband to Britain’s major population centres, but preventing the final pockets of the country from being left behind as networks move away from copper.

It also means the definition of success is changing.

Five years ago, the central question was how quickly Britain could build fibre. As coverage approaches maturity, the questions increasingly concern who remains unconnected, how much it costs to reach them and whether consumers actually migrate onto the new networks once they arrive.

From catching up to finishing the job

So, is Britain falling behind?

Against the world’s fibre leaders, the UK still has ground to make up. Countries such as Spain, Japan and South Korea reached near-universal fibre coverage earlier, while Britain spent longer relying on technologies that incorporated its existing copper and cable infrastructure.

But describing Britain today simply as a broadband laggard misses what has happened over the past five years.

The country has moved from less than a quarter of homes having access to full fibre to more than four in five. It now ranks ahead of several comparable developed economies on full-fibre availability, and network operators are approaching the expensive final stage of nationwide deployment.

Britain entered the full-fibre era late.

The more relevant question now is whether it can finish the rollout as strongly as it has caught up.

Some workforces have raised concerns about staff members leaving jobs due to burnout, including midwifery and teaching.

Hannah Leonard, from the Royal College of Midwives union, said: “Midwives do an extraordinary job, and they deserve to feel pride in their profession, not burnt out within a few years of qualifying”.

Neil Butler from the teaching union NASUWT said: “Changes must be made to bring back the joy into teaching. While it is a relentless grind we will continue to lose good teachers from classrooms in Wales.”

Laura Doel from Trade Union Congress Cymru, said: “Our research shows that stress is the number one risk at work, higher than traditional dangers like exposure to chemicals, working at height and unsafe machinery.”

She said actions by employers who offer wellbeing measures are welcomed, but tackling the root cause of stress such as “low pay, insecure contract and impossible workloads” was key.

A spokesperson for the Health and Safety Executive, Britain’s national regulator for workplace health and safety, said: “Employers have a legal duty to protect workers from risk factors that cause work-related stress by assessing and properly managing key areas of the work.”

The Welsh government said it was working with employers and trade unions to reduce pressures, support staff wellbeing and ensure appropriate mental health support was available.

If you or someone you know has been affected by the issues raised in this story, information about available help and support can be found via BBC Action Line.

MONTREAL — Mid-Day Squares, which self-manufactures refrigerated snack bars, has raised $8 million in a debt funding round led by Investissement Quebec and Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions.

The funding round will be used to expand its Montreal manufacturing facility and launch into Walmart and Costco in the United States.

“This fundraise will get us to be able to handle $250 million of capacity,” said Nick Saltarelli, co-founder and co-chief executive officer of Mid-Day Squares. “We launched across the country in 300 Walmart stores as a test. We’ll be launching into Costco by Sept. 1.”

The company’s facility will expand from approximately 16,000 square feet to 35,000 square feet and will receive a new production line.

The expansion is happening to handle demand from the rise of consumers taking GLP-1 drugs, Saltarelli said.