The End of Copper Phone Lines: What to Do Next
Adapted from Forbes Business Council
Direct Answer
Copper landlines (POTS) still quietly run fire panels, elevator phones, alarms, fax machines and payment terminals in buildings that don’t think of themselves as “on telecom.” Carriers are retiring that copper network faster than most leaders realize, and the cost of staying on it is climbing just as fast. Leaders should audit every system still riding on copper, rank them by risk and compliance exposure, and move to a resilient replacement — POTS IN A BOX® — on a staged timeline they control.
Key takeaways
- Copper phone lines still power systems most leaders don’t associate with telecom: fire panels, elevator phones, access control, fax, and payment terminals.
- Carriers are retiring copper networks at an accelerating pace, and the FCC has removed case-by-case approval requirements that used to slow the process down.
- Legacy POTS lines are getting dramatically more expensive to keep — up to several thousand dollars per line, per month, according to a senior managed services executive cited in the original piece.
- A resilient replacement combines cellular connectivity, battery backup, and intelligent failover — and can integrate with existing panels and devices without a rip-and-replace.
- Audit, rank by risk, assess alternatives, and move in stages — don’t wait for a forced migration.
Many of us can still recall our past home phone number. It was permanent, predictable, physically tied to a place. For decades, landlines were the only reliable way to communicate — long before mobile devices and cloud-based collaboration reshaped how we connect.
But what many leaders don’t realize is that this same legacy infrastructure — the copper-based public switched telephone network (PSTN) — still quietly underpins critical systems across the enterprise. And it’s disappearing.
In its recent announcement, the FCC eliminated case-by-case approval for copper retirement and overrode state and local requirements to accelerate the ongoing copper wire retirement process.
The hidden dependency on copper
Despite decades of digital transformation, copper landlines — often referred to as plain old telephone service (POTS) — remain embedded in our critical infrastructure.
They power systems many organizations don’t immediately associate with telecommunications: traffic control systems, elevator emergency phones, building access controls, fire panels, fax machines and payment terminals.
In hospitals, senior living facilities and campuses, POTS lines are still used to connect “help” or fall-detection alarms — the kind that trigger when a patient presses a button or a resident needs immediate assistance. These systems were designed around one key assumption: that the copper line would always be there, always powered and connected. Now copper is fading to black.
Copper theft is rising, driven by the increasing value of raw materials. In California, AT&T experienced more than 7,300 copper theft incidents in 2025, with losses exceeding $54 million. Most importantly, carriers themselves are retiring these networks at an accelerating pace. What was once considered the most reliable layer of communication is now one of the least predictable.
The real cost of staying put
There is also a financial reality that many organizations are just beginning to confront. Maintaining legacy POTS lines has become disproportionately expensive. The cost of an analog line can exceed several thousand dollars per month; multiply that across hundreds or thousands of lines in a distributed enterprise, and the cost quickly becomes material.
As carriers decommission copper infrastructure, the economics shift further. Fewer technicians are trained to service these systems. Replacement parts are harder to source. Service level agreements degrade. Organizations are paying more for less reliability.
A senior managed services executive noted that enterprises are still spending extremely high amounts — sometimes as much as $6,000 per line per month — to support legacy telecom infrastructure that carriers are in the process of phasing out.
From reliability to resilience
The hesitation to move away from POTS is understandable. Analog lines provided something unique: line-powered connectivity. Even during a power outage, the system stayed up. For life-safety systems, that reliability was non-negotiable.
Regulators, including the FCC, have recognized the inevitability of the PSTN shutdown and have established requirements for “adequate replacement” solutions. These replacements must maintain critical capabilities such as resiliency, device compatibility and access to emergency services like 911 — with enhanced location awareness.
That is why today’s POTS replacement solutions combine multiple layers of resilience, including battery backup, cellular connectivity and intelligent failover. If one path goes down, another takes over automatically. Modern POTS replacement solutions can also integrate seamlessly into existing environments, preserving compatibility with legacy devices — alarm panels, fax machines, elevator phones — while abstracting the complexity of the underlying network.
A copper line cannot tell you when it is about to fail. A digital system can. With centralized management platforms, IT teams can monitor device health in real time, receive proactive alerts and resolve issues before they impact operations.
Key considerations
For CIOs, CTOs, CFOs and others, the end of copper is more of a strategic inflection point than just a technical upgrade. Yes, there is risk in maintaining legacy systems that are becoming less reliable and more expensive. But there is also opportunity in modernizing them.
Organizations that move early can reduce operating costs tied to legacy infrastructure, improve reliability across critical systems, gain real-time visibility into previously opaque environments and align legacy-dependent systems with modern IT architectures. But there are some key considerations before transitioning from an analog to a digital infrastructure:
- Conduct a basic audit of all legacy telecom services. Catalog which systems rely on copper landlines — such as alarm systems, point-of-sale devices, fax, elevators, or emergency call lines — and note regulatory or contractual obligations tied to them.
- Track usage volume, failure rates, maintenance costs and redundancy options. Set thresholds for risk tolerance (e.g., number of critical services still dependent on copper, or cost per month to maintain legacy lines) to inform timing for migration decisions.
- Consider waiting only if dependencies are minimal, costs to replace are high, or regulatory allowances exist. Industries like healthcare, banking or emergency services may require faster migration due to compliance and safety considerations.
- Assess alternatives. This includes cellular, VoIP, fiber or hybrid setups. Base your decision on reliability, latency, cost and integration with existing systems. Cellular may offer speed of deployment; VoIP reduces line costs but may need backup power; fiber provides long-term scalability but much higher upfront investment.
- Use a staged strategy. Combining multiple technologies can reduce operational risk, avoid service disruptions and provide time to test replacement systems while gradually retiring copper.
Where the audit usually finds surprises
Leaders who commission a copper audit expecting a short list generally get a longer one, and the additions cluster in the same few places.
Circuits installed during construction. Refuge-area call stations, elevator phones and emergency call boxes were frequently commissioned by a general contractor and never given a recognizable label on a telecom invoice. They show up on fire alarm drawings and in elevator inspection files rather than in the phone bill.
Circuits owned by another department. Security holds the alarm panels, facilities holds the elevators, finance holds the payment terminals, engineering holds the metering. The telecom bill sits with none of them, which is why a single-source inventory is reliably incomplete.
Circuits with no known purpose. Most portfolios contain analog lines nobody can account for. These are open inventory items, not disconnect candidates — the cost of guessing wrong on a line that turns out to serve a panel is considerably higher than the cost of tracing it.
Second dial-out paths. A panel configured with primary and secondary reporting occupies two circuits, and inventories built from device counts rather than circuit counts systematically undercount.
Ranking by risk, concretely
“Rank by risk and compliance exposure” is the right instruction and an abstract one. In practice the ranking falls out of two questions per circuit: who notices if this fails, and how long does it take them?
| Tier | Circuits | Why first |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fire and burglar panels, elevator phones, refuge stations, call boxes | Inspection consequence; third-party dependencies (supervising stations, AHJs, elevator contractors) whose calendars you do not control; longest to verify |
| 2 | POS, ATM, payment lines | Failure stops revenue immediately |
| 3 | Fax, telemetry, metering, building automation | Fail silently; the symptom is a data gap discovered later |
| 4 | Convenience and courtesy phones | Can absorb a retry |
Tier 1 goes first not because it is the largest but because it has the least schedule flexibility. A supervising station test window and an AHJ determination are external dependencies, and discovering you need them late is what turns a planned migration into a forced one.
What “resilient” has to mean at acceptance
Resilience is easy to specify and easy to leave unverified. Three things make it real, and each is separately testable.
Measured backup runtime, not rated capacity. Run the appliance on battery alone, with the real endpoint connected and exercised, and record when it drops. Rated figures assume a load and a temperature; the measured number is the one that belongs in the documentation. See battery backup.
Failure that announces itself. A path that fails silently between inspections produces false confidence, which is worse than a known outage. Confirm that a break raises a trouble condition at both the endpoint and the monitoring point, by inducing one rather than waiting for one.
A per-endpoint pass criterion. A fire panel passes when the supervising station confirms a test signal by account and zone. An elevator phone passes when someone at the answering point confirms two-way audio from inside the car. A fax line passes on a multi-page transmission verified at the receiving end. Dial tone proves the port and nothing beyond it.
Record who tested what, when, and what the result was. That record is simultaneously the acceptance artifact, the inspection packet, and the baseline against which a future fault gets diagnosed.
The end of nostalgia
The persistence of copper in enterprise environments is a form of nostalgia — a belief that what worked in the past will continue to work in the future. But the economics, the technology and the regulatory landscape all point in the same direction. Organizations that treat this as a forced migration will bear the cost. Those that treat it as an opportunity to modernize can gain something far more valuable: a more resilient, visible and future-ready foundation for critical communications.
For a deeper look at the regulatory timeline behind this shift, see our guide to the FCC’s 2025 copper retirement rules and AT&T’s copper shutdown and what it means for your building. For the longer history of how dial tone came and went, read the death of dial tone as we know it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most commonly fire alarm panels, elevator emergency phones, burglar alarm panels, area-of-refuge and stairwell call stations, fax machines, payment and ATM terminals, gate and entry intercoms, and utility metering or telemetry. These are usually owned by different departments than the telecom bill, which is why a single-source inventory is reliably incomplete.
By how quickly a failure is noticed and what it costs. Life-safety circuits first — fire panels, elevator phones, refuge stations — because they carry inspection consequences and depend on third parties whose schedules you do not control, such as supervising stations and the authority having jurisdiction. Then revenue circuits, then telemetry that fails silently, then convenience lines.
For each circuit: the number, the serving wire center, where it physically terminates, what equipment is connected, who depends on it, and what breaks if it stops working. Reconcile carrier circuit lists, a physical walk of each site, and departmental knowledge — no single source is complete, and lines with an unidentified far end are open items rather than disconnect candidates.
Test per endpoint against its own criterion, not once on a telephone. A fire panel passes when the supervising station confirms receipt of a test signal by account and zone; an elevator phone passes when someone at the answering point confirms two-way audio from inside the car; a fax line passes on a multi-page transmission checked at the receiving end. Dial tone proves the port and nothing more.
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