#5: POTS Replacement ‘Scare Tactics’

This one got legacy telco providers and their partners pretty fired up.

They’d been eyeing an Aug. 2, 2022, deadline for POTS replacement that the FCC enacted nearly four years ago now. Many had taken to social media to express their dismay.

It turns out that there were a lot of scare tactics and misinformation associated with the deadline. The FCC confirmed to Channel Futures that it had not mandated an Aug. 2 deadline across the board. It only applied to a very small subset of POTS lines, many of which aren’t those that channel partners sell.

“There are 38 million POTS lines still out there on various ILECs and CLECs, and none of them are mandated by the FCC to be shut off or transitioned to IP telephony,” said Jay Morris, now channel chief at KeyStone Solutions. “Not previously, not now, not in the near future.”