Are Traditional POTS Lines Really Going To Disappear on Aug 2, 2022?

The rumors about POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines going away is somewhat true. The FCC has made it possible for traditional phone companies to abandon their traditional phone lines that have been around since 1876, well over a century. FCC Order 19-72A1 grants forbearance to LECs (Local Exchange Carriers) from the mandate of providing UNE (Unbundled Network Element) Analog Loops to incumbent LECs. In regular language, the original Telecom Act of 1996 required local phone companies to provide access to subscriber copper loops to their competitors at a fixed cost. This new order by the FCC no longer mandates that local phone companies provide these loops to their competitors. This obligation ends August 2, 2022. Please understand that does not mean that they will flip a switch and all the POTS lines will end at midnight which is what some are trying to make people believe to cause panic to move to VoIP. It does mean that the phone companies are going to start to aggressively move their customers to other solutions.

We are already seeing some of the affect where the pricing for phone lines are going up dramatically, I am seeing POTS lines the used to sell for $20-$30 per line sell for $80-$100 now. This technique essentially discourages users from buying these lines and seeking alternative Voice over IP solutions, which has grown rapidly in the past decade. In fact, US VoIP business lines jumped from 6.2 million to 41.6 million between 2010 and 2018 according to Statistica. Many feared stabilities of their voice service with VoIP, but the industry has matured greatly since the first for profit VoIP application was first introduced in 1995 by VocalTec. In the first decade voice quality was poor at best and not reliable but that has rapidly changed and now major corporations rely on VoIP for their phone lines. In fact, per a 2022 statistic from Blueface Research, 61% of companies are switching to VoIP setups. Best of all, CISCSO reports that this is a 77% improved productivity for small businesses by using VoIP features and 82% of companies report cost savings when moving to the cloud per Microsoft. So, if you are considering VoIP, now may be a very good time to make the jump. Give us a call today and we can help you determine your best options and see if VoIP is the right choice for you.

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