POTS Line Replacement Options

What are your options for replacing your company’s analog POTS telephone lines?

In the video below, Mike explains the three options you have, now that the phone company is decommissioning copper phone lines.

Want Mike’s recommendations on the best vendors to quote for replacing your company’s POTS lines, for 10+ lines? Click the button below and ask him today.

About Mike

Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

I had a customer reach out to me the other day, and they sent me a letter that they received from their telecommunications provider for their POTS lines at one of their locations. And it basically said, we’re getting rid of your POTS lines like yesterday, and you need to find another something to do with them because we’re getting rid of it.

And I have to admit, I was a little bit behind the eight ball on that, and it’s kind of embarrassing because I’m someone who’s been in the industry for over 20 years. I’ve got hundreds of customers with POTS lines, and it’s been something I used to sell when I first got in the industry. So I’m very familiar with it. And it just caught me off guard, as I’m sure it’s probably caught all of you off guard.

Lesson Learned

So at the end of the day, POTS lines are being decommissioned. Those old copper telephone lines are being decommissioned. Plain old telephone service, that’s where the word POTS comes from. They’re being decommissioned from the telecom service providers because the copper in the street is just too costly for them to maintain. They don’t want them anymore. They’re getting rid of them. But the problem is everybody has them for alarm lines and elevator alarm lines, emergency phone lines, faxes, modems, all kinds of stuff out there.

So what do you do?

Well, I wanted to make a video on it because after I got that letter from my customer, I researched it myself to find them the options. There’s tons of great options out there, but I wanted to make a video on what I found the options are.

Have more than 10 POTS lines?

But before I get too deep into it, a quick plug, if you’d like my recommendations on the best service providers to quote for POTS line replacement, don’t Google it, just reach out and contact me via email or by phone (714.593.0011). It won’t cost you anything. I’ll be able to hook you up with the right service providers quickly. I’ve been in the industry a long time, so I’ll help you avoid a lot of mistakes. More information on that at the end of the video.

The Dilemma

So you have POTS lines or analog phone lines that are just plain old copper phone lines for your company, and you’ve maybe gotten a letter that says these are going away. Well, what are your options? Maybe you’re using them for a fire alarm or a burglar alarm or an elevator emergency number, or maybe an emergency phone that’s sitting somewhere in the office, or maybe it’s being used for gate access, to open and close a gate, like an intercom system that opens and closes a door within your organization, unlocks it or opens a gate, things like that. Those are all the uses for POTS lines that are out there. There’s a lot of them. So you’ve gotten the letter and you’re like, hey, what are our options?

Well, there’s really three alternatives. One I think is better than all three, but let me explain it.

ATA to SIP

So your first option is to go out and purchase an analog adapter, what we call an ATA adapter, that will convert that analog signal of that device that needs an analog line, like your alarm line or things like that, it’ll convert that analog signal over to IP and be able to send that over your internet connection. And you can get a SIP trunk for it, or you can put it through your hosted cloud PBX service. You can do it over the internet. So in essence, you can send that analog signal over the public internet as SIP, or over your hosted PBX service, things like that. So that’s one option you can do.

The downside of that is that although it’s fairly inexpensive to do it that way, it might cost you $20 a month for the SIP trunk in order for that type of service to work, the downside is what happens if your internet goes down? That means your alarm lines go down. And what happens if your power goes out? Well, if your power goes out, your Internet’s not going to work either. So, well, what happens if somebody tries to break in and they cut the power, or what happens if there’s an emergency and the power goes out? That means your emergency line is down. Nobody can get out on that emergency line. So that’s the downside of doing it over your internet connection.

ATA to LTE

The second option is to do what we call POTS over LTE cellular, pretty good option. The actual analog signal is converted to a cellular signal and they put a device out there on site that does that. And it goes out over a cellular network.

That sounds pretty good, except for what if the power goes out? Do you have a backup? Do you have backup power on the cellular device?

And also, what if the cellular signals are jammed? What if it’s an emergency like happened during 9/11, where everybody’s on their cell phone and you can’t get through on a cell phone call at all? All the cellular signals are jammed for whatever reason. Or maybe there’s just some bad call quality going on, on the cellular network, and you have a dropped call on the cell, on the cell call, or things like that. You have some spotty service. So those are some of the downsides of POTS over LTE.

All-In-One Appliance

There’s a third option out there where they bring a box on site, and it has two different SIM cards for LTE service from two separate LTE service providers. So for an alarm line or any type of analog line, it’s got two different options for cellular networks. Also, for alarm lines or for emergency service lines, they can send it over a private band, not the public cellular LTE band, but a private band that’s not subject to all the jam ups that are taking place from all the people joining them, not all the dropped calls and bad cellular connection, things like that. A private band is a lot cleaner. It’s a lot more reliable in terms of call quality, and it’s private. So if there’s an emergency and all the cellular networks get jammed, the private band is not going to get jammed.

So you get a private band, you get multiple options for LTE. So for non-essential stuff, like a fax line, for instance, you have two different options for LTE networks on two separate providers. And they’ll actually find the best route of those two. You can also plug in your internet connection into the same device, and it can have a tertiary option. So it can check two different cellular networks. It can also check your internet network as well. So kind of intelligent prioritization going on, things like that.

How much does this appliance cost?

The device also has a battery backup for 24 hours, and it’s around $50 per month if you have over, like I’d say 10, 10 analog lines minimum. So if you have 10 analog lines, that is a great solution. If you just have one analog line, it’s for a fax line, you might just want to do the second option that I mentioned, over LTE, or maybe the first option.

But if you have over 10, you have some alarm lines and things like that, it’s fairly inexpensive. $50 a month per analog line, that’s probably less than you’re paying today for that analog line. If you look at that analog line, plus all the surcharges and all that stuff, it adds up. Oh, and by the way, there aren’t all the same surcharges and taxes and fees on those cellular POTS over LTE. It’s only maybe $5 per line. So you’re not going to pay all these crazy additional taxes and fees that you’re paying on your POTS lines today.

Have 10+ POTS lines and want more information?

So I hope that helps a little bit. Those are some of the different options. I recommend the third option, especially if you have 10 or more POTS lines out there. If you’d like my recommendations on if you have over 10 or more, and you’d like my recommendations on the best service providers to quote for that box and have them bring out a box like that, that’ll take up to eight analog lines or some of them will take like 16. They can bring out multiple boxes. If you’d like my recommendation on the best service providers to quote for that type of service and you have over 10 analog lines, don’t research it. Just contact me, via email or by phone (714.593.0011). I’m happy to give you my recommendations. I’ll ask you a few questions to qualify it a little bit more. And then I’ll introduce you to the right service providers, help you get quotes.

And the nice thing is, those service providers will pay me my broker fee so you don’t have to pay me anything for introducing you to the right vendors. So absolutely no excuse not to at least reach out and see what I have to say.

Please support our YouTube channel

I hope the video was helpful. If so, don’t forget to hit the like button down below and subscribe to the channel so you can get updates on all my videos. I put out about two videos every single week. So you get all the different videos on things like cyber security and like POTS over cellular and cloud PBX and call center and penetration testing, all kinds of cool videos I’m doing. So let’s talk soon, and I will catch you on the next one.