The End Of Copper Phone Lines: What Leaders Should Do Next | Forbes

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. But 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 told me 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 Federal Communications Commission (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:

The End Of Nostalgia

I see the persistence of copper in enterprise environments as 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. But 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.