- Landline phone service is going away, faster than many people realize
- But there are a number of replacement options
- Telephone companies are thrilled to be retiring their copper networks and discontinuing plain-old-telephone service
The times they are a-changin' when it comes to landline telephone service. Since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) streamlined its rules for copper retirement in March 2026, telephone companies have been accelerating their transition away from legacy copper networks and increasingly retiring the plain-old-telephone service (POTS) that runs over them.
In March 2026 FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the new rules will help service providers save billions of dollars a year from not having to maintain copper lines for a dwindling number of consumers.
But many consumers are taken by surprise when they receive a notification from their long-time telephone provider that their landline service is being discontinued.
For instance, Teresa Mastrangelo, senior manager of competitive intelligence at Calix, posted on LinkedIn in August, “Well, it has finally happened....Verizon sent me the message that they are retiring my copper landline. Provided a whole 90-day’s notice. Did not offer an alternative.”
What choices do customers have?
Well, there might be other POTS providers in their area. Or, they can give up on landlines entirely like many people in the U.S. have done already and just use their cell phones — presuming that they have cell service at their locations. They might be able to sign up for a voice-over-IP (VoIP) service from one of the major cable companies if that’s available in their area. Alternatively, they may consider tapping a voice add-on from a fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband provider. And last, but definitely not least, they could tap a voice add-on from a satellite broadband operator such as SpaceX’s Starlink.
Fierce recently spoke with an executive from Ooma, who said the company’s StarDial product was like VoIP-over-satellite. Consumers with a Starlink broadband service can connect StarDial to their Starlink equipment to get a voice connection.
On the enterprise side, MetTel is a company that helps businesses deal with the retirement of POTS.
MetTel’s Chief Operating Officer Andoni Economou said the company helps organizations that have a lot of equipment that depends on POTS. This equipment ranges from fire alarms, to elevators, to security systems to IoT sensors.
MetTel helps organizations replace their POTS with MetTel devices that can work with existing equipment.
“For example, we won the United States Postal Service and the Veterans Administration contracts to replace their POTS lines,” said Economou. “A lot of these facilities are in the middle of nowhere. They have equipment that's not transferable. And unless you can find a device that's going to be able to communicate with that particular protocol that that piece of equipment has, it's not going to work.”
MetTel’s devices can use anything for access, whether it’s a wired broadband connection, a wireless service or a satellite connection like Starlink.
In many ways, it’s fortuitous that satellite is an option now, because otherwise people in very remote places would be entirely out of luck.
Economous said of satellite, “It's a true transformational technology change. What SpaceX has provided us in terms of an access method on this Earth is just remarkable.”
Service providers are retiring copper and POTS at a fast clip
Economou said that at its height, the U.S. had about 130 million POTS lines. But today, there are only about 15 million. “There are six major LECs actively executing formal copper retirement programs,” he said. “It's AT&T, Lumen, Verizon, Frontier, Fidium and Windstream.”
Of the 15 million remaining POTS lines, about 8.5 million are in the commercial and government sectors and 6.5 million are on the consumer side.
The above-named service providers can’t shed their copper lines fast enough. They want off the hook for aging infrastructure as they move quickly to fiber broadband. Economou said he thinks these companies will try to retire all their commercial POTS lines by the end of 2029. “So that's 8.5 million lines over 40 months,” he said. “I think it's going to get compressed into a very chaotic environment, and we're looking to do what we can for our customers.”
AT&T’s CEO John Stanky said during a September Goldman Sachs conference, “There's a bunch of copper out there that probably makes AT&T the fifth largest copper mine in the United States right now. Seriously. And that copper needs to come out and needs to be monetized. And that monetization allows us to pay for the work to shut down all that infrastructure and rip out the mainframes and do all the things we need to do to wind up leaving this decade as a fantastic metropolitan fiber company with a kickass wireless network.”
Speaking at the same Goldman Sachs conference, Verizon’s CEO Dan Schulman said taking copper out of its networks “is a great cost savings for us.” And he said the company wants to re-purpose its thousands of copper-based central offices for edge computing to serve AI.
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