Like many organizations across the U.S., JCPenney was faced with the retirement of traditional copper POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines. As telecom carriers have been in a years-long process of phasing out this older technology, costs have been rising, sometimes to as high as $1,400 per month for a single phone line. In addition, telecom carriers are decreasing the service of copper infrastructure, and have been discontinuing certain products as they retire their copper networks. JCPenney had 5,000 lines in 660 stores across all 50 U.S. states, making the digital transformation of their network a substantial undertaking.
One of the challenges of moving off of POTS was the fact that JCPenney had a large number of specialty phone lines (i.e., alarm and elevator) that were designed to use traditional telephony and are generally incompatible with next-generation VoIP systems. Furthermore, JCPenney wanted to leverage a new digital communications infrastructure to modernize its retail environment.
After weighing options and running pilot tests, JCPenney selected MetTel’s POTS replacement solution, a fully managed service that connects analog systems to cloud-based data and voice services, making VoIP conversion possible for legacy equipment. The MetTel solution connects to the Internet via broadband, Wi-Fi, or 4G LTE SIM. Wireless back-up provides business continuity during network outages and dual SIMs offer added failover protection for emergency line assurance. MetTel provides access to all three major cellular carriers with the prequalification of LTE/5G coverage in the customer’s area.