Setting the Record Straight on POTS Replacement ‘Scare Tactics’

… resale discounts rather than commercial agreements. And the channel engages far more with the latter.

“Very few carriers or CLECs took advantage of UNEL, and those who did have either moved those facilities already back to straight resale product via their commercial agreements or they’ve transitioned those of those customers to some sort of IP telephony,” Morris said.

Misinformation

Yet the messaging that has emerged on social media paints the picture of a impending, full-scale POTS decommissioning.

And customers are hearing it.

“I had a Fortune 100 customer call me in a panic. They read one of these posts and said, ‘I have to replace my network by August,'” Artale said. “And I said, ‘No, you don’t. There’s maybe a small subset of lines that we have to move from one service type to another, still over copper. Don’t panic. There’s no impending doom.’”

Artale said customers will ultimately see through the misinformation. And for the channel partners who have adopted the incorrect messaging from their vendor partners, their credibility is at stake.

“Customers are going to see through that. They get a little upset when they learn about what’s really happening,” Artale said.

Not everyone in the channel has run with the misinformation. For example, Allstream notes on its website that the FCC did not mandate POTS retirement. But Morris said he has seen a steady stream of partners and direct sales reps relaying the message of a mandated POTS sunset.

“Don’t sell your products based on scare tactics,” he said. “Whatever it is you sell, sell it on the merits of the product, the need it fills, the value if offers, and why your company should fulfill that need.”

POTS Transformation

Neither Morris nor Artale deny that POTS is declining. Carriers are investing less in the service, and support has waned. Artale said that in a time gone past, you could put in a ticket for a service outage and get help from dispatch the same day. That time has extended to at least three days now, Artale said.

So yes, POTS investment and support are plummeting. But that does not mean the FCC has ordered a shutoff.

“When you’re looking at a product that has no investment, that goes down when it rains, takes three days to fix, takes longer to provision, and then you have rates going up exponentially, it’s really an economic issue and a service quality issue than it is a regulatory issue,” Artale said.

On the other hand, the benefits of transitioning off POTS include visibility, network analytics and the ability to consume a managed solution.

Allstream argued in its blog that pricing deregulation will combine with ILEC copper retirement plans to eventually phase out POTS. However, Artale said any sort of catch-all mandate for POTS replacement is years out.

“Yes, it’s in everyone’s best interest to have a strategy to transform off of copper,” he said. “But let’s do it at a reasonable timeframe that makes sense for each customer. And let’s communicate things accurately.”