Telephone landlines are rapidly becoming technological relics. Just ask AT&T. The telecommunications giant earlier this year applied for permission to stop servicing landlines in California, and it previously committed to cutting its footprint of copper wires in half and replacing them with fiber optic and ethernet connections by 2025.
For the majority of Americans who have fully switched over to cellular service at this point, the death of landlines might not seem like a big deal. But for retailers with brick-and-mortar stores, those buried copper wires, known as “plain old telephone system” (POTS) lines, still provide the infrastructure for crucial safety and monitoring systems such as fire and burglary alarms, public safety phones, and access control systems.
Max Silber, VP of mobility and IoT at MetTel, which is in the business of helping retailers replace these old wires, told Retail Brew there are 35 million of these lines left in the US, and 14 million of them are used by commercial businesses such as retailers, many of which rely on them to connect their buildings to essential emergency services.
“When there’s a breach or there’s a smoke detector in a specific zone, that communication goes back to the monitoring station via this type of technology, via these types of copper lines,” he said, adding that POTS lines are designed to continue working even during a power outage, because the energy powering them is usually generated locally from a telecommunications facility.
Regulated out of existence: But now the cost of maintaining these networks is rising, as old lines reach the end of their life span, and federal regulators clear the way for their discontinuation. As of 2022, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) removed a rule requiring local exchange carriers to offer POTS service at competitive rates, stating they were “preserving and prolonging dependence on outdated technologies and services and artificially delaying the migration to next-generation networks and services that benefit American consumers and businesses.”
While the transition started before the regulatory changes—in 2020, Verizon, for example, requested a waiver from the FCC to retire copper lines across numerous parts of New York—now the process is speeding up. Carriers are decommissioning outdated lines and significantly raising the cost of those lines they keep, which is becoming a problem for those businesses caught off guard by the price hikes, Aaron Stoermann, owner of Spend Nova Consulting, wrote in a blog post for communication tech industry publication No Jitters.
“When speaking with some companies, they have underestimated the impact of these orders and have been faced with tens of thousands in increased costs for only a handful of lines,” he wrote.
Upgrade season: Once a POTS line is decommissioned, Silber said retailers that are not prepared to replace them could face fines upwards of $10,000–$20,000 a day from fire marshals for lacking connection to emergency services, which in some cases could result in a location losing its certificate of occupancy and eventually being shut down.
The challenge with finding a replacement, he explained, is that POTS lines are hardwired to directly notify an emergency service not only that an alarm is going off, but where precisely in a building it is going off at the time.
He said that generally mom-and-pop shops have been more reactive, scrambling to find a replacement only after a line is discontinued, but that bigger national retailers have been more proactive. He pointed to the example of JCPenney, one of MetTel’s clients, which had been dealing with cost increases and maintenance issues related to its POTS lines across its footprint.
“They needed a single provider to be able to come in and replace those services with the least amount of interruption,” Silber said.
MetTel’s systems instead rely on existing broadband networks or pairs of redundant wireless LTE networks, the latter being the go-to in the case of a power outage. “For them, it really was a game changer. It really addressed both the cost problem as well as the outage problem,” he said.