Verizon Copper Retirement: What It Means for You

What Verizon actually filed

The record of the filing, with dates, applicants, and source documents, is in our newsroom: Verizon Files to Discontinue Copper POTS Across Nine States and D.C.. The short version follows.

Verizon’s September 9, 2026 application seeks authority under Section 214(a) and 47 C.F.R. § 63.71 to discontinue “Plain Old Telephone Service served by time-division multiplexing technology over copper” for residential and business customers. The applicants include the six Verizon incumbent telephone companies serving Maryland, New England, New York, the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest (Verizon North), Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., plus 34 Frontier Communications companies the filing describes as “all Verizon companies.” That is why the notice some customers received is signed “Frontier, a Verizon Company,” and why states such as California, Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, and West Virginia, historically Frontier territory, appear in a Verizon filing.

The application states that Verizon’s network “could serve over 28 million locations in these states with POTS” while “only approximately 750,000 residential and business locations, or 2.7%, still subscribe.” It is filed under the discontinuance rules still in effect until the FCC’s March 2026 Network and Services Modernization Order takes effect, which means it must show that replacement services meet the FCC’s existing Alternative Options and Adequate Replacement tests. Our FCC copper retirement compliance guide explains what that order changed.

Two Verizon proceedings, not one

Much of the coverage blends two applications. They have different states, different dates, and different status.

	September 9, 2026 application	WC Docket No. 26-227
States	CA, CT, DC, IL, MD, MA, MI, NY, PA, WV (portions)	AZ, DE, NJ, NM, OH, RI, SC, UT, VA (portions)
Remaining copper POTS locations	~750,000 (2.7%), per Verizon	~277,000 (under 2.25%), per Verizon
FCC public notice	Not yet released as of September 16, 2026	DA 26-890, August 26, 2026
Comment deadline	15 days after the public notice	September 10, 2026
Automatic grant	31 days after the public notice, unless the FCC intervenes	September 26, 2026
Earliest discontinuance	On or after November 30, 2026	On or after October 23, 2026
Customer notices	Mailed September 8, 2026	Mailed in August 2026

The docket number for the September 9 application will appear in the FCC’s acceptance notice. Until then, the ECFS document link above is the primary source.

Who is affected

Everyone still on copper dial tone from Verizon or Frontier in the mapped service areas, residential and business alike. The application’s own list of affected retail services includes “Residence Dial Tone Service,” “Basic Service Access Line,” and “Individual Line,” which is the service class most analog business equipment sits on.

The business exposure is not the office phone. Those left copper years ago. It is the equipment nobody thinks of as telecom:

• Fire alarm and burglar alarm panels dialing a supervising station over one or two analog lines. See fire and burglar alarm communication.
• Elevator emergency phones and area-of-refuge stations, installed by the elevator contractor and tested at inspection. See elevator emergency communication.
• Fax machines in healthcare, legal, and government offices where the faxed page is still the record.
• Point-of-sale and ATM backup lines, gate and door intercoms, and dial-up telemetry for generators, building automation, and utility meters.
• Analog trunks feeding an older PBX or key system.

Each of those is usually owned by a different department than the one that receives the carrier’s letter, which is why the September 8 notice may already be sitting unread in a facilities inbox.

What “adequate replacement” does and does not settle

Verizon’s application is careful on this point, and the distinction matters for anyone running analog equipment.

What Verizon is committing to. Copper POTS will be discontinued only at locations where a customer can obtain Verizon fiber voice, Verizon mobile wireless, Verizon’s fixed wireless POTS voice replacement, or fiber, cable, or mobile wireless voice from one of ten named third parties (AT&T, T-Mobile, Xfinity, Spectrum, Breezeline, Mediacom, Optimum, Shentel, Sparklight, or Armstrong). In the Virginia proceeding, Verizon told county officials in writing that “if the customer does not have one of the [replacement] services available, then Verizon is not discontinuing copper voice service at their location,” a statement Rappahannock County placed in the FCC record.

What that leaves open. Availability of a replacement network at an address is a network question. Whether a given fire panel communicator, elevator phone, or fax machine works over that network is an equipment question, and the application does not answer it. Verizon’s residential notice says its replacement “supports essential services like 911, many legacy alarm systems and faxes, and many medical devices.” “Many” is the accurate word. Alarm panels depend on line voltage, disconnect supervision, and DTMF timing that consumer voice adapters handle inconsistently, and fax depends on modem tone handling that some VoIP paths compress away. Our guide to fax, POS, and ATM lines after copper covers the failure modes.

Backup power. The application states that Verizon’s fixed wireless replacement devices use commercially available AA batteries: Voice Connect provides “up to three talk hours, or up to 23 standby hours,” and Verizon Voice Gateway “up to 4 talk hours and 24 standby hours.” It also notes that the FCC’s residential backup power rule expired in 2025. Those figures are appropriate for a home phone. Rappahannock County’s objection makes the counter-argument for rural areas: the local electric cooperative recorded 269 outages longer than 24 hours between January 2025 and August 2026, and the county logged 154 emergency calls from Verizon copper lines in six months. For a life-safety circuit, battery runtime is a design decision, not a default.

E911. Verizon certifies that its mobile and fixed wireless replacements comply with applicable 911 rules. For a business, the practical requirement is that the replacement device provisions the correct dispatchable address for the location where the equipment sits, which is a configuration step, not an assumption.

Timeline for planning

Date	What happens
August 26, 2026	FCC public notice DA 26-890 accepts the 26-227 application (nine states, Virginia included)
September 8, 2026	Verizon and Frontier mail customer notices for the nine-state-plus-D.C. application
September 9, 2026	Nine-state-plus-D.C. application filed with the FCC
September 10, 2026	Comment deadline in WC Docket No. 26-227
September 26, 2026	26-227 application deemed granted unless the FCC intervenes
On or after October 23, 2026	Earliest authorized discontinuance in 26-227 states
31 days after public notice	Nine-state-plus-D.C. application deemed granted unless the FCC intervenes
On or after November 30, 2026	Earliest discontinuance in the nine states and D.C., pending approval

Two cautions. First, “on or after” is a floor, not a schedule. Verizon’s notices say a second letter will carry the actual disconnection date for each customer, and that any earlier disconnection notice already received still applies. Second, the FCC can pull either application from streamlined processing, as Virginia counties have requested. Neither possibility is a reason to wait, because the direction is settled and the economics of maintaining copper only move one way.

A five-step plan for Verizon and Frontier copper customers

1. Inventory every analog line and what is on it. Reconcile three sources: the Verizon or Frontier bill, a physical walk of each building, and the departments that own the connected equipment. Lines with an unidentified far end are open items, not disconnect candidates.
2. Rank by consequence of failure. Life-safety circuits first: fire and burglar panels, elevator phones, refuge stations, emergency call boxes. They carry inspection consequences and depend on third parties, the monitoring company, the elevator contractor, and the authority having jurisdiction, whose calendars you do not control. Revenue and clinical circuits second. Silent telemetry third. Convenience lines last.
3. Choose the replacement path per endpoint, not per site. A residential voice gateway, a generic VoIP adapter, and a purpose-built analog gateway behave differently on line voltage, disconnect supervision, DTMF, and fax tones. The complete guide to POTS line replacement compares the options.
4. Test each endpoint against its own criterion. A fire panel passes when the supervising station confirms receipt by account and zone. An elevator phone passes when 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.
5. Document and monitor. Record test results for the AHJ and the monitoring company, and put the replacement lines under remote monitoring so a failure is reported before an inspector or an occupant finds it.

How DataRemote helps

DataRemote builds the POTS IN A BOX® family of analog gateways that carriers and managed service providers deploy when copper is retired. Three characteristics matter specifically for a Verizon or Frontier customer.

Verizon-certified hardware. The 90X1, 90X2, CDS-9010, and CDS-9090 hold Verizon Open Development certification, Verizon’s carrier approval for devices operating on its network. Details, including which models are covered, are on that certification page. The 90X1 is also certified on AT&T and T-Mobile, and carries two SIM slots, so a site at the edge of one carrier’s coverage can fail over to another rather than depend on a single signal. That is the relevant answer to the coverage objections raised in rural Virginia and West Virginia: not a promise of universal reach, but a second carrier path where one exists.

Analog behavior preserved. The appliances present standard analog line voltage, dial tone, ring, and DTMF to the equipment already on the wall, so an existing alarm panel, elevator phone, or fax machine connects to the gateway the way it connected to the copper jack. The 90X1 provides up to eight FXS lines; the modular 90X5 adds 5G RedCap with LTE fallback, dual-SIM (one physical, one eSIM), and swappable power and radio modules.

Battery and power sized for the application. The 90X1 and 90X2 carry an internal 18-cell lithium battery rated for up to 48 hours of standby, plus a UPS output for approved connected devices. The 90X5 ships with a 24-hour battery and offers 8-hour, 48-hour, or no-battery configurations. Integrated GNSS supports E911 location provisioning. Every unit reports to the Ara management platform, which is how a line failure at a remote site becomes an alert rather than a discovery.

Compliance note: DataRemote equipment is designed to support code-governed applications; it does not by itself guarantee code compliance. Final acceptance of any installation may depend on the product model, endpoint compatibility, installation, configuration, carrier, monitoring provider, the code edition in force, the jurisdiction, and the authority having jurisdiction. Certification and listing records are model-specific; see each product page and the issuing organization's own records.

The carrier’s schedule or yours

Verizon’s filing is explicit that it will not cut copper where no replacement exists, and that customers will hear again before their line is disconnected. Both are reassuring for a home phone. For a building with a fire panel and two elevators on Frontier copper in western Pennsylvania, the same commitments mean the carrier decides when the letter arrives, and the facilities team then has whatever time the letter allows to coordinate the monitoring company, the elevator contractor, and the fire marshal. Starting the inventory now converts that into an ordinary project. Our AT&T copper retirement guide describes how the same sequence has played out on the other large incumbent’s network.