Airport Navigation & Obstruction Light Monitoring: A POTS Replacement Guide

Why airfield lighting communication is mission-critical

Airport lighting systems guide aircraft during taxiing, takeoff, and landing — and mark obstructions that could otherwise threaten air navigation. That includes runway edge and centerline lights, approach lighting systems, taxiway lighting, and the red/white obstruction lights on towers and tall structures on and around the field. When a light fails and no one knows, the safety margin for night-time and low-visibility operations erodes immediately.

The communications layer beneath these lights is just as critical as the lights themselves. Airfield lighting control and monitoring systems (ALCMS) rely on data circuits to report each fixture or circuit’s status back to a central monitoring point and to accept control commands. Historically, those circuits — and the voice/ringdown maintenance lines that go with them — have ridden on copper POTS.

What the FAA expects for obstruction light monitoring

The FAA’s guidance on marking and lighting obstructions, Advisory Circular 70/7460-1, sets clear expectations that make reliable communications non-negotiable:

• Monitoring: Obstruction lighting should be closely monitored by visual or automatic means.
• Immediate outage reporting: Any failure of a top light or a flashing obstruction light, regardless of position, must be reported immediately to the FAA’s outage reporting / NOTAM line so a Notice to Air Missions can be issued.
• NOTAM lifespan: A NOTAM is automatically deleted after 15 days — the sponsor must extend the outage or report restoration, which requires knowing the current status of the light at all times.
• Restoration reporting: As soon as normal operation is restored, the outage reporting and NOTAM offices must be notified.

Separately, the FCC has authority to require the painting and/or illumination of antenna structures where they may constitute a menace to air navigation (47 U.S.C. § 303(q)), and registered structures carry their own light-outage reporting obligations. In short: the regulatory framework assumes you always know whether the light is on. A monitoring path that can silently fail undermines the entire premise.

The challenge: copper POTS can’t keep up

Airports face a compounding set of problems with legacy copper lighting communications:

Challenge	Consequence for the airfield
Manual inspections	Physical patrols of lighting circuits are labor-intensive, costly, and only catch faults at the moment of inspection.
Copper retirement	Carriers are retiring copper POTS networks, removing or repricing the very lines airfield systems depend on.
Rising cost	Legacy line pricing climbs as the service is deprioritized, straining maintenance budgets.
No fault self-notification	A damaged copper line gives no alert — the monitoring link can be dead while everyone assumes it’s healthy.
Slow repair	As copper is deprioritized, repair windows stretch from hours to days.

The last point is the most dangerous. The whole purpose of monitoring is early detection — but if the transport itself can fail silently, the airport can be out of compliance and unaware.

The solution: POTS IN A BOX® for airfield lighting

DataRemote’s POTS IN A BOX® is a battery-backed IP and cellular appliance that replaces the copper POTS lines feeding airfield and obstruction lighting monitoring — without ripping out the ALCMS, field controllers, or maintenance phones that expect an analog interface.

How it works

POTS IN A BOX® presents the familiar analog interface that lighting controllers and monitoring equipment already use, while carrying that traffic over managed 5G/LTE and IP behind the scenes. Instead of a passive copper pair that can die unnoticed, the airport gets a supervised, monitored link with continuous health reporting.

This lets airports move from reactive manual inspections to proactive, internet-based monitoring: real-time polling data gives instant visibility into the operational status of each navigation light or obstruction-light tower across the property, and issues surface as alerts the moment they occur.

What that changes operationally

• Fewer truck rolls. Faults are pinpointed remotely, so crews are dispatched with the right part to the right location instead of patrolling to find the problem.
• Faster resolution. Instant alerts compress detection time from “next scheduled inspection” to “right now.”
• Continuous compliance posture. Knowing a light’s real status at all times supports timely NOTAM issuance, extension, and restoration reporting.
• Resilience. Integrated battery backup and UPS power output keep monitoring alive through power interruptions.

Why the 90X1 fits airfield deployments

The 90X1 POTS IN A BOX® pairs multi-carrier 5G with LTE failover and up to 48 hours of battery backup, and is certified across Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile — useful across a sprawling airfield where a single carrier may not cover every vault or perimeter tower equally. For sites needing higher line counts, the CDS-9090 supports up to 8 analog ports with optional Band 14.

Benefits at a glance

• Improved reliability — a supervised link replaces a silent copper pair.
• Lower inspection costs — remote monitoring displaces routine manual patrols.
• Mass management of devices — administer every appliance across the airfield from one platform.
• Real-time monitoring and alerts — instant notification of light or line faults.
• Multipath communication — cellular plus IP with automatic failover for continuity.

Centralized visibility comes from Ara, DataRemote’s device management platform, which provides diagnostics, notifications, and API-driven status across a fleet of endpoints — so a lighting team can watch an entire airfield’s communication health from one screen.

Planning your airfield lighting migration

1. Inventory the circuits. Map every lighting vault, controller, obstruction-light tower, and maintenance phone still on copper POTS.
2. Prioritize by risk. Start with obstruction lights and approach/runway systems whose outages trigger NOTAMs.
3. Confirm coverage. Validate cellular coverage at each vault and perimeter location; multi-carrier certification gives flexibility where one network is weak.
4. Deploy behind the demarc. POTS IN A BOX® installs on the network side, preserving the analog interface your ALCMS already uses.
5. Turn on monitoring. Configure real-time polling and alerting through Ara so faults surface instantly.

Set a new standard for airfield lighting reliability

Airport lighting is too important to depend on a copper line that can fail without warning. DataRemote’s POTS IN A BOX® enhances operational efficiency, safety, and regulatory posture for critical aviation infrastructure by replacing legacy POTS with supervised, battery-backed, real-time monitored communications.

For a closely related critical-infrastructure use case, see our guide to cell and radio tower connectivity with POTS IN A BOX®. For the broader regulatory context, see The FCC’s 2025 copper retirement guidance and our overview of copper retirement across the telecom industry. For a one-page summary to share with your operations or engineering team, download the airport navigation lighting flyer (PDF), or contact our team to scope a deployment.