Britain Is About to Find Out What Happens When You Do Not Migrate Before the Deadline
I want to talk about the UK's Radio Teleswitch Service (RTS) situation because it is a perfect real-world illustration of what happens when you let legacy technology run past its end of life and do not have a migration plan that actually reaches everyone in time. The RTS is a system introduced in the 1980s that uses a radio signal to tell older electricity meters when to switch between peak and off-peak rates. It has been quietly running this whole time, controlling heating and hot water for nearly 800,000 homes in Great Britain. And it is being switched off.
The technology that produces the radio signal is at the end of its operational life. It cannot be adequately maintained anymore. So the decision was made to phase it out, transition everyone to smart meters, and move on. Simple enough in theory. The reality is that campaigners were warning as recently as late May that over 300,000 homes might not make it through the transition in time. The replacement rate needed to reach everyone was around 5,000 meters per day. The actual rate was about 1,000. Do that math. That is not a comfortable margin.
The part of this story that I cannot stop thinking about is the failure mode. If your RTS meter loses its signal and has not been replaced, your heating does not just stop. It might get stuck permanently on. In the middle of summer. Running full blast. With no way to turn it off except to call your energy supplier and wait. Or it might get stuck permanently off, which is slightly less catastrophic in summer and potentially a serious problem for anyone elderly or vulnerable heading into a cooler season. This is not a theoretical risk. This is what happens when legacy infrastructure is decommissioned without adequate runway for replacement.
I have managed technology migrations for organizations of all sizes. I know what it looks like when a migration timeline is ambitious and the execution cannot keep pace. You start making triage decisions. You prioritize the easy cases. The hard cases, the people in rural areas, the high-rise flats without good smart meter signal, the households where nobody picked up the letter or scheduled the appointment, those are the ones who end up holding the bag. It is not malicious. It is resource math. And resource math without proper planning hurts real people.
The lesson here is ageless and applies to every organization managing technology lifecycle decisions. When you know a system is going end of life, you build your migration timeline backward from the deadline, not forward from today. You identify your hardest cases first, not last. You over-communicate until people are annoyed, because the cost of being annoying is infinitely lower than the cost of 300,000 households with broken heating. And you test your replacement rate against your deadline before you announce the deadline publicly. Deadlines that cannot be met are not deadlines. They are just dates.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/may/26/british-electricity-meters-rts-switch-off-heating
