Are You Ready for the POTS Line Shutdown? DataRemote's COO Weighs In

Wireless Dealer Magazine recently spoke with Timor Brik, COO of DataRemote, about the company’s role in providing POTS line replacement solutions to carriers, dealers, and end customers.

A conversation with COO Timor Brik

Since 1991, DataRemote has worked at the forefront of analog copper telephone lines and their progression toward digital transformation. Brik emphasized that businesses need to adapt as telecom carriers phase out copper landlines:

“Carriers are decreasing the service and repair of copper infrastructure and discontinuing certain products as they retire their copper networks, while increasing the cost to consumers.”

— Timor Brik, COO, DataRemote

“Network transformation reduces costs, provides enhanced functionality, and eliminates dependence on archaic copper landline networks.”

— Timor Brik, COO, DataRemote

What the copper shutdown means for your business

Landlines are going away. If your retail store operates its main number and security alarm on a landline, now is the time to plan a more affordable, more secure alternative. Instead of replacing an expensive alarm or fire panel — which can require new permits — a drop-in landline replacement like POTS IN A BOX® connects to the equipment you already have. Its 24+ hour backup battery keeps the line up through a power or internet outage, meaning less downtime and fewer missed transactions.

“The POTS IN A BOX® is our flagship product,” Brik noted. This enterprise-grade 5G router directly replaces wireline POTS lines, giving businesses a reliable, cost-effective communication channel. It supports critical systems such as fax, fire alarms and burglar alarms, and analog modem data, with full E-911 access and battery backup for uninterrupted service.

“We are committed to staying at the cutting edge of technology,” Brik added, pointing to DataRemote’s emphasis on security and privacy and its implementation of rigorous data protection practices.

Built on carrier partnerships

Brik also highlighted DataRemote’s partnerships with major telecommunications companies, including AT&T, MetTel, and RingCentral, which reinforce DataRemote’s position in the POTS replacement market. These partnerships allow DataRemote’s POTS IN A BOX® hardware to be deployed through carrier-managed service offerings at scale — as seen in deployments like the MetTel USPS modernization across 23,000 postal locations.

DataRemote’s solutions are designed to deliver significant cost savings, improved reliability, and streamlined communications — making the company a practical partner for businesses transitioning from copper analog lines to digital connectivity.

Choosing the right device

DataRemote offers multiple POTS IN A BOX® models depending on network requirements and line count:

• 90X1 — 5G with automatic internet failover, up to 48-hour battery backup, and UPS power output.
• 90X2 — the LTE counterpart to the 90X1, with the same core continuity features.

For a full breakdown of certifications and compliance standards behind these devices, see DataRemote’s Trust Center.

What a shutdown notice actually looks like

Businesses expect a letter that says “your phone line is being disconnected.” That is rarely how it arrives, which is a large part of why sites get caught.

Notices are addressed to the billing contact, not the facilities or security manager who knows what is connected. They often describe the change in regulatory language — a wire center being retired, a service being discontinued, a grandfathering date — rather than naming the consequence for a specific circuit. And because retirement of the physical copper and discontinuance of the service riding on it are filed separately, a site can receive one notice and assume it has heard everything.

For a dealer, this creates a straightforward opportunity: ask the customer who receives their carrier correspondence, and whether that person forwards it to anyone. The answer is frequently that nobody does.

The other tell is the invoice. Sharp per-line increases on analog circuits generally precede withdrawal in a market, and they show up in accounting long before anyone in facilities hears about a date.

Why dealers get called after the cutover, not before

The pattern is consistent enough to plan around. A building migrates its voice service, the project is declared complete, and weeks later something that was never part of the project stops working — a fire panel that has quietly failed to report, an elevator phone that now reaches a disconnected number, a fax line that negotiates and drops.

The reason is that the migration was scoped as a telecom project and the failures are in equipment nobody classified as telecom. Alarm panels, elevator phones, refuge stations, gate intercoms and payment terminals are usually owned by different departments, maintained under different contracts, and absent from the telecom inventory entirely.

Two practical moves. First, when a customer mentions any voice migration, ask what else is on copper at the site — and expect the first answer to be incomplete. Second, get to the line inventory before the cutover rather than after, because inventory work done under a deadline is where circuits get missed.

Sizing a replacement for a typical alarm site

Sizing errors are the other recurring source of return visits, and they come from counting the wrong thing.

The number that matters is FXS port count — one per analog circuit being replaced — not bandwidth. A device with excellent throughput and too few ports cannot serve the site. Three counting rules cover most cases:

• A panel configured with primary and secondary dial-out paths needs two circuits, not one.
• A shared line still generally wants its own port, because dedicating a port per endpoint avoids having to reproduce line seizure behavior on a shared one.
• A line with an unidentified far end is an open inventory item, not a disconnect candidate. Count it until someone confirms what it does.

Then add margin. Adding a port later means changing hardware; ordering one spare port per site usually does not.

Questions to ask before quoting

A short list that prevents most surprises between the quote and the acceptance test:

• What is the measured signal at the exact install point — inside the enclosure, door closed? Not in the corridor.
• What backup runtime does the AHJ require for each life-safety circuit, and has anyone asked them?
• Which supervising station monitors each panel, what signal formats do their receivers decode, and what supervision interval do they expect?
• Which code edition has the jurisdiction adopted? It is frequently not the newest published.
• Who confirms the test at the far end — the station, the answering point for the elevator phone, the person receiving the fax?

Every one of these is cheaper to answer during scoping than during a second site visit. For the per-endpoint test criteria worth writing into an acceptance plan, see cellular POTS replacement.

Where the margin actually is

For dealers evaluating this as a line of business rather than a one-off, the economics differ from hardware resale in two ways worth understanding before quoting.

The recurring side outweighs the hardware. A replacement appliance is a one-time sale; the connectivity, monitoring and line operations behind it continue. Deciding early which of those you own and which the customer or a provider owns determines whether a deployment generates ongoing revenue or ongoing support calls with no revenue attached. The functions that commonly get left unassigned are provisioning, firmware updates, line-status monitoring and who gets called when a panel stops reporting at 2 a.m. See managed cellular for the specific functions worth naming in a contract.

Verification is billable work, and skipping it is expensive. An acceptance test that includes station-confirmed alarm signals, an elevator phone answered from inside the car, a multi-page fax to a real destination and a load-tested battery runtime takes real time. It also produces the documentation packet the customer needs for inspection — which is a deliverable, not overhead. Sites that skip it generate the return visits that erase the margin on the original install.

The related trap is scope. A quote covering “the phone lines” and a site whose exposure includes a fire panel, two elevator phones and a refuge station are not the same project. Price the inventory work explicitly.

Talk to DataRemote about your copper transition

If your business, alarm panel, or fax line still depends on a copper POTS connection, don’t wait for a shutdown notice. Contact DataRemote to find the right POTS IN A BOX® configuration for your lines.