Rising costs are a valid concern, but there’s another issue with POTS that can pose significant risks to your business that you may not have yet considered. The issue is service reliability, where five 9’s uptime has historically been the gold standard for failsafe telephony service. Unfortunately, the infrastructure that enables this reliability is also in terminal decline. It’s no longer realistic to expect five 9’s service when considering all of your POTS needs.
Much of this is due to regulatory changes. In addition to lifting price caps that have triggered unprecedented hikes in subscriber charges, the FCC has also recently stopped requiring carriers to maintain their copper networks. Both changes align with the long-held desire among incumbents to exit the POTS business and shift their focus completely to supporting digital forms of telephony.
Copper networks may provide highly reliable phone service, but as the infrastructure ages, it’s not being maintained nor is it being replaced or upgraded. Not only will the frequency of service outages rise, but it will take longer to restore service since fewer resources will be available – technicians, trucks, inventory, etc. - to properly support POTS.
Another contributing factor is the analog nature of legacy technology since they cannot be monitored or repaired remotely, unlike digital networks. Over time, as weather and neglect take their toll, their reliability will inevitably be impacted at some point.
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