Costly copper lines consume corporate coffers: MetTel

• A MetTel exec dishes details about the recently inked contract to replace US Postal Service landlines in 17,000 locations
• One business POTS line can cost over $1,500/month to maintain
• MetTel is “working feverishly” to roll out changes to USPS over the next six months

As telcos work to retire their copper lines, federal agencies and enterprises have to figure out how to replace their legacy copper-based services in a timely manner. That’s where MetTel comes in.

MetTel earlier this month won a contract with the United States Postal Service (USPS) to help the agency speed up its copper retirement. MetTel will replace USPS’ Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS), or analog landlines, across 17,000 locations with the company’s POTS replacement solution.

MetTel places equipment on the customer premises that converts USPS’ existing phone signals to an IP telephony system, said Don Parente, MetTel’s VP of public sector sales and solution architecture.

That equipment will interface with the devices on premises that require a POTS signal, he told Fierce, “basically digitize them into IP packets, and then using the LTE network, send those packets securely to our backbone.”

This way, USPS doesn’t have to replace its existing equipment to retire its copper lines. It’s hard to say exactly how long the migration will take, but Parente said MetTel is “working feverishly to roll things out” over the next six months.

“I think one of the linchpins of this whole thing is we’re managing the equipment on premises,” he said, adding MetTel is using AI engines in the back end of its network operations center to detect any problems “long before the customer would know.”

Copper is costly

As the copper user base shrinks, it becomes more expensive for organizations to maintain their POTS lines. A single business POTS line can cost over $1,500 per month, Parente noted.

Once the local exchange carrier sends out disconnect notices, “often our customers have six months to very quickly figure out what they’re going to do.”

“I think there’s been a lot of organizations that maybe didn’t fully understand the impact of what copper retirement was going to look like,” Parente said. “But it’s become a reality in a major way.”

While MetTel generally rolls out its POTS replacement product to wireless LTE or 5G connections, “it could absolutely plug into a fiber network and deliver the same results.” It can also run on a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite connection, such as Starlink.

How long will it take before we see wide-scale copper retirement? Carriers like AT&T and Lumen have asked some states for relief of their carrier of last resort (COLR) obligations (a requirement to provide basic telephone service to anyone who requests it).

But states have pushed back on those requests, arguing rural areas may not have a sufficient alternative to voice services if carriers do away with their landlines.

In Parente’s view, “it’s hard to say exactly when the knee of the curve is going to be, but I think we’re starting to see [copper retirement] accelerate right now for sure.”

“Even if the [copper] plant itself isn’t retired, very soon it’s going to be non-economical to use it,” he said.

As New Street Research has noted, delays in Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) funding will likely delay the discontinuation of copper services for ILECs – adding to the transitional costs.

For MetTel’s part, Parente said at least half a dozen agencies are using the company’s POTS replacement product. It’s also been tasked to replace POTS lines for emergency services providers, like the New York City Fire Department.

But not all devices can be easily upgraded from copper to IP telephony, he noted, particularly those that provide emergency services.

“A fire panel requires this analog input – it can’t just be swapped out. It would be a very expensive proposition to just rip out an entire fire panel,” he said.

“At the same time, there’s a lot of regulation around fire panels. So it has to be connected, it can’t be disconnected.”