Cities Are Cutting the Cord on Copper Lines

Preparing for the copper telephone line retirement

The digital age demands modern infrastructure. Yet beneath city streets and inside government office walls, a growing challenge persists: aging copper telephone lines. While residents expect instant digital communication, many local governments still depend on this legacy technology — a system that increasingly poses safety risks, drains budgets, and slows modernization efforts. The FCC has streamlined the process for carriers to retire copper networks, and the transition is already underway. Cities that fail to adapt risk being left behind.

The FCC counted 78 million wireline retail voice connections in service as of June 2025, roughly 15 million of them still traditional switched copper — and 53 million of the total are business connections, which is where municipal analog endpoints sit.

What municipalities must know

This issue is particularly relevant for local and city governments. Depending on location, specific risks and opportunities exist to facilitate the transition:

Region	What’s happening
California	Rapid copper network retirements by providers like AT&T make proactive planning and funding acquisition critical; state authorities have raised service-continuity and consumer-protection concerns.
Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas	AT&T has announced closures of copper feeder facilities, signaling a significant shift toward digital alternatives.
Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, Washington	CenturyLink’s planned copper retirements in favor of fiber optic lines present an opportunity for local governments to partner with the provider and accelerate upgrades.
Florida	AT&T Florida filed a public notice to retire parts of its copper network, impacting areas including Orlando — local governments must act quickly to secure resources and inform residents.

USPS POTS Transformation: proof digital IP works at scale

Even federal agencies are recognizing the need to modernize. The United States Postal Service recently completed a transition of over 23,000 locations nationwide from traditional copper lines to a digital IP-based solution, earning MetTel a 2024 USPS Supplier Excellence Award. This demonstrates the feasibility and benefits of such a transformation, even at national scale.

The USPS’s POTS Transformation solution — hardware that replaces Plain Old Telephone Service with a digital equivalent — allows agencies to maintain existing analog equipment while gaining the advantages of IP telephony, including increased reliability, cost savings, and advanced monitoring features.

This solution supports specialty lines including elevators, fire alarms, and emergency call boxes, and has received approval from public safety organizations — further demonstrating its reliability for life-safety use cases.

Why cities need digital IP solutions over copper landlines

Today’s analog landlines rely on century-old copper-wire technology, and maintaining this aging infrastructure is costly — a burden that ultimately passes to residents through higher fees. As climate-related disasters grow more frequent, the vulnerabilities of copper lines — susceptibility to water damage and power outages — pose a growing risk to public safety. Transitioning to digital IP systems delivers greater reliability during emergencies, offering a lifeline when it matters most.

Fortunately, viable digital alternatives exist, offering meaningful cost savings, increased reliability, and enhanced features. Solutions like the one implemented by the USPS demonstrate that transition doesn’t require replacing existing equipment — a POTS Transformation approach allows continued use of analog phones and devices while gaining the benefits of IP technology, including improved reliability, performance visibility, and support for specialty lines like elevators, fire alarms, and emergency call boxes.

Why the resistance to change?

People are naturally wary of abandoning the familiar, especially something as seemingly reliable as a landline. But these copper lines have reached end of life. As they age and deteriorate, they pose a significant risk to critical infrastructure — no different than neglected roads, bridges, or tunnels. Just as governments invest in maintaining physical infrastructure, they must modernize communication networks.

What municipal procurement has to account for

Public-sector migrations carry constraints that private ones do not, and they lengthen timelines in predictable ways worth building into the schedule.

Budget cycles rarely match carrier timelines. A retirement date set by a filing does not wait for a fiscal year. Where the full portfolio cannot be funded in one cycle, the sequencing decision becomes a risk decision: fund the life-safety circuits first, because those are the ones with inspection consequences and third-party dependencies.

Procurement rules may require competitive solicitation, which adds months. Starting the inventory before the solicitation is drafted is what makes the specification accurate — an RFP written without knowing the circuit count and endpoint mix produces bids that cannot be compared.

Federal buyers face additional requirements. Where TAA or NDAA sourcing provisions apply, they constrain the eligible hardware set and should be established before evaluating products rather than after. Those are attestations about supply chain, not certifications about performance, and they are a separate line of inquiry from fire and life-safety credentials.

Multiple departments own the endpoints. Public works, parks, fire, police, transit, libraries and facilities each hold circuits, and the telecom bill sits with none of them. The inventory has to be assembled across departments or it will be incomplete.

Municipal endpoints that get missed

City portfolios accumulate analog circuits over decades, in categories that rarely appear on a telecom inventory:

• Emergency call boxes in parks, garages, transit stops and along trails
• Campus blue-light phones at community colleges and municipal complexes
• Elevator phones in every public building, each inspected independently
• Area of refuge stations in stairwells and elevator lobbies — frequently installed by a contractor at construction and never labeled recognizably
• Traffic and signal telemetry, plus obstruction and navigation lighting at municipal airports
• Water and utility metering and SCADA circuits at pump stations and treatment plants
• Gate and barrier controllers at yards, depots and impound lots
• Fire and burglar panels in every facility

The pattern: the circuits with the highest consequence are frequently the ones with the least documentation, because they were installed as part of a construction project rather than a telecom one. Fire alarm drawings, elevator inspection files and facility as-builts find circuits that invoices do not.

Building a defensible record

Public agencies are audited and inspected, which raises the value of documentation above what a private migration usually requires. Produce it at cutover, per circuit, while the information is at hand.

For each circuit, record: what it serves and where it physically is; the code and edition the reviewer applies; the models installed, with certification or listing identifiers and the issuing bodies; the configuration, including what supervises the path and at what interval; the measured backup runtime from a real load test rather than a datasheet rating; the end-to-end test result, naming who tested, who confirmed receipt at the far end, and when; and the retest interval.

Ask each reviewing authority what they want before assembling it — requirements vary by jurisdiction, and one conversation early is cheaper than a second inspection. For the code framework these reviewers apply, see emergency communication requirements for buildings and NFPA 72.

The path forward

The disappearance of copper lines won’t happen overnight, but the transition is inevitable. Many people remain unaware of existing alternatives and the potential impact of a failing telecom infrastructure. Local governments should take immediate action by conducting infrastructure audits of copper-dependent lines to help ensure continuity of service. Cities that embrace this change will not only enhance public safety and reduce costs but also position themselves as leaders in the digital era.

Continued reliance on outdated technology is impractical when a more cost-effective, resilient, and readily available alternative exists. See DataRemote’s complete guide to POTS line replacement for a practical starting point, or explore POTS IN A BOX® devices built for exactly this transition.

Related reading: Digitizing telecoms for the future explains why copper modernization is now a business imperative, and DataRemote COO Timor Brik weighs in on whether you’re ready for the POTS line shutdown.

— Timor Brik, Chief Operating Officer of DataRemote and licensed attorney with 10+ years of experience modernizing the telecommunications industry