Is POTS Replacement Required?

I’ve written a couple of recent blogs about POTS replacement and have received a few questions about “do we have to do this” or “is this required”? 

Good question.  First of all, there is nothing mandating you as a business owner to upgrade your internal systems.  You can decide what you want to do with your business communications infrastructure.   I am just pointing out that the networks these analog end points communicate on or with have been or are soon going away, or are going to cost you a lot to operate. 

So, you can certainly just leave everything alone and hope that everything still works.  That is certainly an option – one that if you have not done anything yet about is the course you are on.  If you choose this option, you may run afoul of some compliance issues at some point, or as I wrote above the system may just not work someday.  If you have an analog door alarm, and it doesn’t work, what would that mean to your business? 

You can also replace your analog communication systems.  If you had a PBX circa 1998 and you replaced it, then you replaced one of your analog systems.  Like a full-scale replacement, including getting new phones, or even eschewing new phones and moving to desktop/mobile clients instead.  You may have done this with other systems as well, maybe bringing in e-fax type solutions as an example.  What other analog communication systems are still in use?  You could choose to swap them out too. 

I’m guessing in your business, you have over the years swapped out some of your most important communication systems, but that you still have a few more to go.   

This is where a POTS replacement solution would work best.  You can utilize modern POTS replacement gateway solutions to keep the current analog endpoints still in use, but get them to communicate with modern networks, thereby enabling you to rid yourself of POTS lines.