In answer to your original question, copper is not being turned off in January. What is being turned off is the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) that is provided as a separate service to broadband. From now on the “phone” will be part of the broadband connection. However, that broadband connection could be FTTC over copper or FTTP over fibre. I myself was on BT’s Digital Voice (DV) for three years on FTTC before I upgraded to FTTP, a year ago. Copper broadband is rumoured to be discontinued sometime between 2035 and 2040. (And even then, I wouldn’t hold your breath).
With DV the phone has to plug into a phone socket on the back of the Smart Hub or you can order a DV adapter. The adapter is basically a plug-in phone socket. You plug your phone into that and it uses DECT, (the same wireless system as cordless phones), to talk to the Smart Hub. Your existing phone extensions can be modified to work with DV. Basically, they need connecting to the phone socket on the Smart Hub instead of the old master phone socket. (The filters are not needed. They were more to stop interference from the broadband feeding back into the phoneline. Now the phone is part of the broadband they are not needed, unless you need one to adapt an RJ11 plug to a BT plug. You can still use them if you want). BT will also supply phones that use that DECT to connect directly to the Smart Hub, as a cordless base station. You can also just connect an existing cordless base station to the socket on the back of the hub. (I’m not sure if existing cordless phones will work directly with the hub, as I don’t think the implementation of DECT is quite the standard one).
To fit Full Fibre, they will bring a fibre cable into the house and connect it to a box on the wall called an ONT (Optical Network Terminal). That does not have to be next to the old master phone socket, but it does require power, so it needs to be within 1.5m of a power socket, (or an extension lead). The fitter will negotiate on where it goes but it must be do-able in the budget, (both time and money), allocated. It might be worth having more than one location in mind before he arrives.
Connection of the ONT to the Smart Hub uses a standard cat 5e or cat 6 ethernet cable. Theoretically that can be up to 100m long, (but working techies rarely push beyond 80m). The same applies to any equipment connected by ethernet cables.
Hope that helps.
