Here's how this usually goes.
An IT manager at a company with 12 locations gets a legal notice from their carrier. They have 180 days to migrate off copper POTS lines at a specific set of wire centers. Alarms, elevator phones, door entry systems, fax lines — everything running on those analog circuits needs to move. The clock is already running when the letter arrives.
Nobody sent a warning email. Nobody called. That's not how it works.
AT&T has filed to discontinue copper service in thousands of wire centers across the US since 2019. Frontier's copper network was a major factor in their 2020 bankruptcy. Lumen has been selling off copper assets in chunks. The direction is clear and it isn't reversing.
The FCC requires 180 days notice before a carrier can pull copper service. That sounds like a lot of time. It isn't, once you're figuring out what you have, what depends on it, and who can replace it.
What runs on POTS that people forget about:
- Fire alarm dialers — most local fire codes require tested POTS or an approved alternative
- Elevator emergency phones — ASME code, not optional
- Security system monitoring — the line your alarm company calls out on
- Gate and door entry systems
- Dedicated fax lines
- Credit card terminals at older retail setups
- Emergency call stations in parking structures
For a single-location business, this is a contained project. For a company with 20, 50, 100 locations, it's a migration program — and each location may have different legacy dependencies that need individual scoping.
The replacement options aren't complicated but they aren't one-size-fits-all. SIP trunking handles most voice use cases and is usually the straightforward swap. Cellular backup dialers cover alarm systems in jurisdictions that allow them. Some situations need a hosted voice stack or a broader UCaaS migration, especially if the company is also running legacy PBX that's hit its own end-of-life window.
Not a quote from whoever calls you first. A benchmarked set of options across the full supplier catalog.
What matters is scoping it properly — figuring out what you're actually running, matching it against what carriers can deliver to each location, and getting real pricing across multiple suppliers.
If you're running multi-location and haven't audited your POTS exposure, do it before the letter arrives.