The Risks and High Cost of Keeping your Legacy POTS Lines

For decades, businesses worldwide relied on plain old telephone service (POTS) to stay connected. However, as more advanced technologies dominate the telecom market, keeping POTS lines is becoming increasingly risky and expensive.

If you're a reseller or telecom agent speaking with concerned clients, here's what you should know about the costs and risks of postponing POTS replacement.

The Downsides of Copper Wires

More and more businesses (and homes) are abandoning POTS in favor of LTE and other more advanced communications technologies. Unfortunately, this leaves a smaller pool of users to share the cost of maintaining aging copper wires, which is steadily becoming more expensive.

Because of the ballooning maintenance costs, consumer prices for POTS services keep climbing. In addition, many landline connections are also becoming increasingly unreliable as telecom providers reduce the support for such analog infrastructure, leading to the potential of more frequent outages. In today's economy, even a short-term loss of connectivity can cost a company thousands of dollars in lost revenue and missed opportunities.

The Financial Benefits of POTS Replacement

As the costs of traditional copper/analog lines keep going up, more sophisticated technologies based on LTE are becoming increasingly affordable. As a result, the monthly fees are lower, and most fully managed solutions also include maintenance and network monitoring.

Modern WWAN systems also don't require wire installation or expensive infrastructure. As a result, POTS replacement with LTE typically comes with minimal upfront costs and doesn't have costly maintenance and/or upgrade fees. This allows businesses to add users and move workstations without the limitations of copper wires and routing equipment.

LTE-focused POTS replacement also provides a more reliable connection, with backups and failover functionality that provide uptime of over 99% and performance parameters that will only increase in the era of 5G.