Plain Old Telephony Service (aka POTS), the legacy analog copper phone line, is going away. While this isn’t generally a business concern for human voice telephony (as virtually all have already migrated to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) or mobile) POTS’ sunsetting poses a huge challenge for the myriad of devices and systems engineered to use a POTS line for monitoring and signaling.
The problem is the combination of wireless and VoIP telephony has dramatically reduced the demand for traditional POTS lines. Maintaining complex last-century equipment for an ever-decreasing user base has become untenable—and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has enabled the carriers to (eventually) abandon their traditional POTS infrastructure.
