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. We track the state-by-state picture in the Copper Retirement Tracker, updated quarterly from FCC filings.
Until March 2026, FCC rules required advance notice and a federal review process before a carrier could pull copper service. That process is gone — FCC order 26-19 eliminated the filing and objection regime, and carriers now publish notices themselves. Whatever window your letter gives you is the carrier's clock, not the FCC's. And it isn't much time, 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.