If your organization still pays for analog phone lines — and almost every organization with more than a few locations does — you’ve probably noticed the line items creeping up. That creep is not a billing error and it is not going to stop. Carriers are actively retiring the copper networks that analog lines run on, and the pricing reflects a service they want you off of. Lines that cost $30 a month a few years ago now commonly bill at $65 to $150 or more, with annual increases that would be unthinkable in any competitive service.
Here’s what’s happening, what’s probably still riding on those lines, and how to get ahead of it.
Why POTS pricing keeps rising
Plain old telephone service runs on copper infrastructure that carriers no longer want to maintain. Regulatory changes over the past several years removed the pricing protections and discontinuance restrictions that once kept analog line rates stable, and carriers responded exactly the way you’d expect: steep, repeated price increases designed to push customers off copper, paired with formal retirement of copper facilities market by market.
There is no negotiating your way out of this trend. POTS pricing is not a leverage problem — it’s a product-sunset problem. The carriers are not trying to keep this business; they’re trying to end it. Which means the answer isn’t a better rate on the same lines. It’s knowing exactly which lines you have, which ones you still need, and what the right replacement is for each.
What’s usually still running on analog lines
The reason organizations still carry dozens or hundreds of POTS lines isn’t the phones on desks — those moved to VoIP years ago. It’s everything else that got wired to a copper line over the past few decades and then forgotten:
Fax lines — some still in active clinical, legal, or operational use; many long abandoned but still billing. Elevator phones — code-required emergency lines in every elevator cab. Fire alarm and burglar alarm panels — dialers that communicate with monitoring centers over analog lines. Building entry and gate systems. Utility and HVAC monitoring. Point-of-sale backup lines from a previous decade. And a meaningful number of lines that no current employee can explain at all.
In a typical multi-site review, a third or more of the analog inventory falls into that last category — lines with no identifiable function, billing every month, sometimes for years after the equipment they served was removed.
The exercise: inventory, verify, migrate
Inventory first – Pull the analog lines off your carrier invoices — every line number, its billing location, and its monthly cost. This alone surprises most organizations; the count is almost always higher than anyone guesses.
Verify each line at the site level – Match each line to a physical function: this number rings the elevator in Building C, this one feeds the fire panel, this one goes nowhere. Facilities and IT contacts at each location can usually confirm within minutes per line. Lines with no identified function are disconnect candidates after a safety check.
Migrate what remains, deliberately – For the lines that serve real functions, replacement options exist for every category: LTE- and 5G-based analog adapters (often called POTS replacement or POTS-in-a-box devices) for elevators, alarms, and fire panels; VoIP adapters for fax where fax must survive; and digital fax services where it doesn’t. Fire and life-safety lines require attention to code compliance and monitoring-center compatibility — this is the category to migrate carefully, with your alarm vendor involved, not the category to skip.
The economics are straightforward: replacement solutions typically run at a fraction of current POTS pricing, and the gap widens with every rate increase. For an organization carrying 50 analog lines at today’s rates, the annual difference is real money — before counting the disconnects of lines that served no purpose at all.
The takeaway
POTS costs are on an escalator that only goes up, and waiting converts directly into overpayment. The work is not complicated — inventory, verify, migrate — but it does require someone to actually do it, line by line, site by site. Organizations that run the exercise now set their own timeline. Organizations that wait will run it eventually anyway, at higher rates, possibly on a carrier’s retirement schedule instead of their own.
