Saying goodbye to landlines is a hard task for some businesses

May 19—Everybody's got a cellphone, right? It's true that many New Mexicans long ago hung up on landline phones, but they're not all gone and there's actually more to the story.

Beneath the long transition to digital phone technology, there's been a storm churning — part of a sea change that transformed telecom and telephones decades ago — and it's a little chaotic.

According to a new study by ChamberofCommerce.org, which is not affiliated with local Chambers of Commerce, New Mexico residents are leading the charge on retiring landline phones, with just 22.3% of state residents, or 357,687 people, holding onto their landline phones. On the flip side are 76.5% of state residents who don't have a landline.

As part of the change, service providers are required to offer customers an alternative to landlines either through fiber-optic cables or wireless technology, according to a February CNN report on the topic, which added that consumers will have to decide whether to give up their landlines or potentially face higher costs because of expensive workarounds from the phone companies.

But while old phones and phone lines may still be a nostalgic choice for homeowners, businesses don't have that luxury. Some still need those landlines — at least they need the old copper-wire network. They need them to provide reliable service for alarm systems, elevator phones, gates and doors, ATMs, fax machines and just phones. Copper T1 lines, not wireless cell service, used to be the go-to for busy businesses, but that's changed. With legacy phone companies no longer compelled by law to maintain copper lines, the struggle is on to transition to digital.

Loss of copper lines has impacted businesses, according to those in the industry who work to get businesses hooked up to the phone lines they need.

Allied Communications of Albuquerque has helped businesses with their phone systems for decades.

"Plain, old dial tone was the best, but it's really going away," owner David Sevieri said. "It's really causing a lot of businesses a lot of problems. It's not as big a deal for the residential people because so many people have cellphones now that they don't really use an analog line in their house that much, so it's not that big a deal."

But for businesses, alarm setups used to rely on old copper-wire service, called POTS in the industry, or plain, old telephone service. Now, actually relying on or installing copper can be very expensive, Sevieri said.

"A lot of alarm companies have now gone over to cellular backup," he said.

Background

Technically, a landline is a non-wireless phone. The demise of copper wire-based landline phones followed the rise of digital tech. Before Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, local telephone companies held a monopoly on local telephone service.

According to the FCC in a 1996 memorandum, Congress passed the 1996 Act to open local markets to competition, requiring big phone companies then to unbundle and open their networks to competitors at cost-based rates.

The FCC later acknowledged that this didn't work out very well because it created burdensome costs for businesses that tried to maintain "outdated technologies and services."

The FCC said that given the sweeping changes in the communications marketplace since the passage of the 1996 act, including the migration of users to more digital technology, the public interest was no longer served by maintaining the regulations regarding copper lines. Rather than a foothold for new entrants into the marketplace, the FCC admitted, the regulations had become "a vice, trapping incumbent local exchange carriers into preserving outdated technologies and services at the cost of a slower transition to next-generation networks and services that benefit American consumers and businesses."

In other words, legacy communications companies no longer had to maintain old copper wires because technology was outpacing their usefulness and running up bills for businesses.

Nevertheless, copper lines linger on today even as digital services rise. Many businesses are still stuck with the old tech, along with old phone jacks and in-door lines. And the cost of catching up, sometimes involving gutting old tech and discarding old copper-line service has skyrocketed, leading to complaints that legacy phone companies aren't maintaining the lines .

Better alternative

Sudharman Jayaweera, University of New Mexico professor of electrical engineering and computer science, said he won't advise holding on to copper, because of costs — and it's on its way out of phone systems.

"The costs are a result of the type of work that has to be done with copper, because the system is underground and because it's old, it's more work to keep up," he said.

He said there is a better, more popular alternative.

"Fiber will be cheaper, whereas with the copper if you try to keep it, it will cost them more, because the service providers have to charge more to maintain it," Jayaweera said. "But fiber has much more capacity. With fiber, you can use a much higher data rate or bit rate."

But pulling out copper connections in an elevator phone, for example, is an understandably costly venture.

"It comes down to how much money the service providers, infrastructure providers have to spend on putting these things in place," Jayaweera said.

Ultimately, he said, because providers are no longer mandated to provide upkeep of old landlines, that's not their focus.

Still, should anyone be concerned about keeping some copper wires in working order?

"The only advantage of copper is that if a business is in some disaster where there is a power outage, in those cases some of the old copper systems can work without power," Jayaweera said.

POTS

Deena Crawley, chief of staff at Dion's, said the restaurants have been preparing for the discontinuation of POTS lines for several years. But with more than two dozen locations, there is a mountain to climb.

"Given the number of buildings we have across a large geographic area, and with multiple devices at each, it has been a challenging project," Crawley said in an email. "Throughout, our goal has been to maintain telecom service for our customers and crew."

For Dion's, that comes down to having the phone service needed to operate in an industry that's pivoted toward online ordering and delivery. Therefore, reliable phone service is an actual lifeline for businesses like Dion's — and reliability in such systems requires backups.

Sevieri of Allied said there is a working solution. It's called POTS in a box.

"It runs off Ethernet and it's got carriers connected to it like Verizon and Comcast to provide plain, old telephone service to someone who doesn't have any, but it's not refined enough, the POTS in a box, that can communicate with some of these alarm systems," Sevieri said.

Those would be the alarm systems using copper wire.

Copper costs

Debra Sessa runs Shelby Communications Consultants in Albuquerque, which represents over 40 phone communication carriers.

She says the technical challenges have been made worse by the expenses facing businesses looking to connect service.

"For example, restaurants who have to have fire alarms and backup burglar alarms and backup fire alarms and elevator (phone lines) and all that stuff that's traditionally been over an analog copper line, they either pay an outrageous amount of money to have that or find a new solution," she said.

That's where she comes in.

"What I do is try to find out what the best solution is for each company, as far as what their needs are cost-wise, liability — every company is different," Sessa said.

And, she said, a lot of the new solutions don't actually work well with outdated alarm lines, alarm systems and phone systems.

"So it's really forcing people to do a lot of different things to make their existing infrastructures work as well," she said.

CenturyLink is one of the major telecommunications companies offering communications services for residential and small-business customers in Albuquerque. A spokeswoman for Lumen, the parent company of CenturyLink, said it's been replacing copper with fiber wherever and whenever it can, plus retiring copper facilities that are no longer needed. Danielle Spears, the spokeswoman, said providers also face cost pressures, tough industry regulations and technological challenges.

"The high cost of maintaining copper networks — combined with monopoly-era legacy service regulations — often restricts our options and prevents broadband providers like us from making additional fiber investments the public wants," Spears said in an email. She said an example of the expenses is that repairs to copper networks "frequently require hardware or cables that are no longer in production or supported by manufacturers."

For city officials, the reliability of communications devices and backup systems are of utmost importance.

Inspector Lane McConnell-Hand of Albuquerque Fire Rescue's Fire Marshal's Office confirmed the need for backup systems or "two distinct lines of communication," but he said in an email that the department doesn't stipulate copper line POTS.

"But we do recognize it as one of the acceptable modes of transmission along other like IP, cellular, and radio frequency," McConnell-Hand said.

Sessa said your only options if you can't do copper is POTS in a box.

"They can deliver internet to it and then hand it off like an analog line to your fire panel or alarm panel," Sessa said.

And there are other practical reasons telecom systems need to be reliable and redundant in a business setting.

"Dion's requires a lot of redundancy since there's more reliance in ordering online," Sessa said. "People get very mad if they can't call Dion's for food. Backup is important."

Bottom line

The sad reality is that old copper lines are on their way out. And those old telephones at home?

Sessa has an understandable summary of the situation:

"Technology is changing and that's the issue," she said. "We've got to more or less go with the flow, but it's tough. That's the bottom line. We're relying more on internet and voice over internet, we have streaming. There's still people on copper, or copper T1, but it will be going away."