Your Copper Phone Lines Are Going Away. Here’s What a Small Business Should Do Now

I’ve spent more than 20 years selling and installing business phone systems, and one change is now hitting small businesses everywhere: the phone companies are retiring their old copper lines. Since 2019 the FCC has let carriers stop maintaining traditional copper “POTS” lines (plain old telephone service), and many carriers are raising prices sharply on the lines that are still left, or just announcing a cutoff date.

If your business still has a few copper lines for the main number, a fax, the alarm panel, or the elevator phone, this matters to you.

Here’s what I tell my customers.

1. Take inventory first. Walk around and find every line you pay for. Look at the phone bill and match each number to something real. I often find businesses paying for two or three lines nobody has used in years.
2. Know what each line actually does. Voice lines are the easy part. Alarm panels, fire panels, elevator phones, fax machines, and credit card terminals are where problems show up. Some of them need a cellular communicator or an adapter built for that job, so check with your alarm or elevator company before anything gets cut over.
3. Move your voice to VoIP, but do it right. A good hosted VoIP system usually costs less than copper and gives you features the old lines never had: auto attendants, voicemail to email, ring groups, and calls on your cell phone. The keys are keeping your existing numbers (porting them, which is routine), having a dependable internet connection, and knowing what happens when the power or internet goes out.
4. Plan for outages. Copper lines got power from the phone company, so they worked in a blackout. VoIP doesn’t. A small battery backup (UPS) on your modem, router, and network switch, plus failover to cell phones or a backup internet connection, keeps you reachable. Also make sure your 911 address is registered correctly for every phone.
5. Don’t wait for the carrier’s letter. When a carrier sets a cutoff date, everyone rushes at once. Moving on your own schedule means no surprises and no lost calls.

At COiN Services we help small businesses with exactly this: phones, internet, backups, and keeping it all running. We’ll go through your lines with you, tell you plainly what can be dropped, what has to be replaced, and what it will cost, with no pressure.

Do you still have copper lines on your bill? Contact us at coinservices.net and let’s find out what you’re paying for and what you really need.