POTS Lines (PSTN) Switch Off – Are you Ready?

POTS Lines (PSTN) Switch Off – Are You Ready?

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, businesses face significant shifts in communication infrastructure. Two major events are shaking up the market: the end-of-support for Nortel/Avaya CS1000 systems and NEC’s exit from the telephony space. As a result, the transition from analog to IP-based systems is no longer a luxury – but a necessity.

History

POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), formally known as PSTN (Publicly Switched Telephone Network), is an analog communications method that originates outside of an organization. The PSTN is made up of millions of phones and phone systems interconnected by telephony service providers.

1. The phone converts the caller’s sound waves into electrical signals, which then travel through a drop cable from the business to an outside terminal.
2. The terminal consolidates signals from the surrounding neighborhood and transmits them to a central office.
3. Switches inside the central office analyze the signal to determine the routing destination.
4. Depending on the call’s destination, the signal may be routed to a regional hub (tandem office) or a central office near the call’s destination.
5. Switches in the central office analyze the incoming signal and route the call to the appropriate terminal. From the terminal, the call is transmitted to the local lines that connect the network to a home or business.
6. The receiving telephone handset then converts the electrical signal back into sound waves to complete the call.

 

Costs of Maintaining POTS Lines

The rising costs of Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) lines for businesses are a significant concern, driven by several factors:

1. Infrastructure Maintenance and Declining Usage: The aging analog hardware used to support POTS lines, including PBXs and their line cards, is increasingly more costly to maintain. With fewer customers using POTS, the cost burden on remaining users has increased. Many telecom providers are passing these maintenance costs onto customers, leading to substantial price hikes​​.
2. Regulatory Changes and Deregulation: The deregulation of POTS line pricing by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2019 removed price controls, allowing providers to increase rates significantly. This has led to situations where businesses have seen their monthly costs per line​​ skyrocket.
3. Encouragement to Transition: Providers are also using higher prices to encourage customers to transition to more modern, digital alternatives like VoIP, cloud-based communication systems, or mobile solutions. These alternatives offer more features and are often more cost-effective in the long run​​.

For businesses, the cost of maintaining POTS lines can be prohibitively expensive, sometimes exceeding $1,500 per month per line, especially for specialized uses like alarm systems or elevator phones​. As a result, companies are increasingly looking to migrate away from POTS to avoid these rising costs and benefit from modern communication technologies. These insights and the End-of-Life notices highlight the need for businesses to proactively plan their transition away from POTS lines to mitigate costs and improve communication infrastructure.

POTS Lines End of Life

POTS lines have been going away. Vendors of the technology are exiting the market and issuing end-of-life and end-of-support notices, leaving organizations to upgrade their equipment. As a further incentive, lower maintenance and connection costs, along with better performance characteristics, are being achieved by upgrading to an IP telephony model and moving away from an analog communications model.

Challenges in Upgrading

For the most part, the IP connectivity to support calling is widely adopted and available. The biggest factor for organizations that continue to maintain POTS lines is the high costs, risks, security concerns, and network complexity associated with connecting the new IP endpoints back to the application. Some direct technical challenges include cable distance, wire pairs, cable twisting, and cable terminations/connectors may not match the requirements for an IP upgrade. Re-cabling and network complexity associated with having to connect a new IP endpoint back to the application causes organizations to accept compromising strategies while seeking different technologies to facilitate their upgrades.

Gateways

Voice gateways have been introduced to the market, which allow for a partial transition towards an IP-based SIP trunks, where instead of connecting to the PSTN, phones can connect to an IP service. However, instead of doing a complete migration where the phones, the network, and the service is upgraded to IP, gateways allow for existing analog phones to be encoded onto IP network traffic to be sent through the SIP trunk.

Gateway Limitations

Gateways are an easy method of achieving a partial upgrade to IP; however, they do limit the performance and feature set that a full IP migration can achieve. By keeping the endpoint as the original analog device, rich features like presence management, integration with other network monitoring and control, and collaboration tools will not be present compared to a full IP upgrade. This limited upgrade path reduces overall system performance and digital transformation return on the investment, as gateways are used as a temporary stopgap solution before a full end-to-end IP migration is completed.

Analog to IP Done Right

While gateways have been a popular temporary solution to the challenges and costs of migrating to IP telephony, other technology innovations exist that allow for a full migration without the cost and logistical challenges of new cabling installations. For example, NVT Phybridge PoE switches and extenders allow existing cables to be used for IP transmission, even when the cables themselves do not meet Ethernet specification requirements. Organizations with CAT3 telephony cabling have used the NVT Phybridge PoLRE switch to enable a full IP migration leveraging the existing cabling; which provides up to 1200 feet (365m) reach (over four times the reach of traditional Ethernet switches). Using the existing and proven point-to-point cabling connections provides minimal business disruption and exceptional reliability of analog while benefiting from the full feature set of a complete IP solution. The diagram below illustrates the process to complete a full IP migration without compromise. Thousands of organizations and government agencies have used this strategy to achieve incredible digital transformation outcomes.

Leverage NVT Phybridge switch innovations to simplify and accelerate your upgrade to full IP using existing telephony cabling. Allocate cost savings to devices and applications to improve return on investment, eliminate business disruption during implementation, and align with environmental sustainability initiatives.

Author – Nicolas Puello

Team Lead – Sales Engineering, NVT Phybridge