Appearing on channelfutures.com:
Partners reported a copper crisis earlier this year. Customers were seeing exponential price increases on plain old telephone service (POTS) and time division multiplexing (TDM) lines. While the FCC never ordered ILECs to shut off copper services, the gradual retirement is indeed occurring.
Tim Hanley, senior vice president of channel sales at MetTel, works with customers and partners that are conducting POTS aggregation and POTS replacement. He said he expects POTS transformation services to accelerate in 2024 with businesses no longer willing to look away from their telecom invoices.
“I’ve seen trends over the past year where even though customers have felt the pain, they’ve absorbed the financial pain just because they have other pressing things. There’s other stuff going on,” Hanley told Channel Futures. “I think you’re at that point of them saying, ‘Financially, we can’t keep absorbing this. We have to make the transition.'”