I won't lie, when I walked into the telephone room I wanted to run for the hills. This project looked like it was beyond my scope of knowledge.
But I also knew that not everything in that room was still in use. When I first started working here, I helped port most of the organization’s phone numbers to RingCentral. That meant a lot of the legacy phone infrastructure was likely abandoned.
As I started going through our TPx phone bill, I realized that there were only 11 active lines still connected.
The question was: where were they?
Finding the Remining Lines
The first step was to go into the MPOE (Minimum Point of Entry). This is the location where the telecom provider typically hands off their connection to the building.
Inside the MPOE was a phone punch-down block with 11 tags labeled with the phone numbers listed on our TPx bill. (Thank you to whoever labeled everything.)
Our campus operations team was phenomenal. They pointed me in the right direction for where they thought the corresponding punch blocks might land in other parts of the building.
So with my handy-dandy phone butt set, I set off to see if I could find a dial tone.
If you’ve never seen one before, a butt set is basically a field technician’s phone. It clips directly onto a copper pair so you can listen for dial tone or place a call while tracing lines.
Whenever I got a dial tone, I’d dial my mobile phone. When my phone rang, I could see the number on the caller ID and label the corresponding punch-down block with the phone number.
After that, it was just a matter of tracing where those wires actually went.
In our case, the remaining lines were connected to a few banks of elevators and a couple of fire and burglar alarm systems.
Replacing the Remaining Lines
Once we identified the systems still relying on those lines, we reached out to one of our vendors who connected us with EpicIO.
They sent us a questionnaire about the existing lines and equipment, and within a couple of weeks they were on-site.
Their team connected the cellular communicator to the punch-down block in the MPOE and began testing the circuits. We walked around the building to confirm that the fire and burglar alarm systems were not reporting any communication errors.
Finally, we pressed the call buttons in the elevators to make sure the emergency phones were working properly.
Why Many Organizations Are Moving Away From POTS Lines
For decades, systems like elevator phones, fire alarm panels, and burglar alarms relied on POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines. These analog copper lines were simple, reliable, and widely available.
But as those copper lines age, they begin to deteriorate and are no longer as dependable as they once were. At the same time, much of the telecommunications industry has shifted toward fiber and cellular technologies.
Many telecom providers are actively retiring copper networks in favor of these newer technologies. As a result, maintaining traditional POTS lines has become increasingly expensive, and in some areas it’s no longer even an option.
For organizations that still rely on these lines for critical systems, that means finding alternatives.
In our case, moving these remaining lines to cellular communicators allowed us to eliminate our dependency on legacy copper while keeping the required safety systems connected.
What could I have done better
Looking back, I probably should have started by contacting our fire and burglar alarm provider directly to see if they could provision cellular communication on their systems.
That may have saved me a few hours of tracing lines and testing circuits. Whether it would have saved any money is another question, but it’s likely where I would start if I had to do this project again.
The Result
In the end, the project wasn’t nearly as daunting as it first appeared. It required a few days of attention and a fair amount of walking around tracing cabling, but it was manageable. In some ways, it even reminded me of trying trying to run a network connection over a POTS line.
We were able to eliminate the remaining POTS lines and move those systems to cellular communication.
The result was a savings of nearly $2,000 per month for 11 lines, which made the effort well worth it. And perhaps most importantly, we’re no longer dependent on aging copper phone lines that telecom providers are slowly retiring.