It’s the call no property or facility professional wants to get.
Someone is stuck in your elevator and can’t get out. The phones don’t work. The buttons don’t work. The fire department is on the way to get them out.
And, if you’re managing the Westin in Cleveland, there’s another twist to the story—the person trapped in your elevator is celebrity chef Guy Fieri and his wife.
“This is happening all over the place,” said Nicholas Bequette, Ooma’s director of strategic accounts for AirDial, a replacement for the copper-wire phone lines (also known as Plain Old Telephone Service, or POTS) typically found in places like elevators and fire panels. “When we replace existing elevator phone lines, we find about 50% of them don’t work at the time we go to replace them. The only real way to know is to go into your elevator, press the button and see if you have a dial tone.”
Bequette’s Monday evening presentation at the 2024 BOMA International Conference & Expo explored eight things to consider when upgrading aging POTS systems.
Why Are Copper Lines Going Away?
Phone carriers have wanted to get out of the copper line business for years, Bequette explained. In 2019, the FCC finally agreed with them and declared that POTS lines would be deregulated after three years—so as of 2022, they’re no longer regulated by the government. Some carriers issued notices saying the lines would no longer be offered and property managers would have to find another solution. Others continued servicing the lines for now, but pushed through unprecedented price increases. “Line quality is decreasing,” Bequette explained. “POTS lines are getting harder to replace.”
Copper POTS lines aren’t just found in elevators—they may be all over your building. Equipment commonly serviced by POTS lines includes fire alarm panels, security panels, PBX trunks, pool phones, gate phones, blue light phones, boiler room alarms, door entry intercoms, and even fax machines in applications that can’t use e-fax, such as healthcare facilities.
Property professionals have three options for replacing POTS lines at this point, Bequette said.
1. Hope and pay. Hopefully your existing POTS lines keep working and don’t strand someone in an elevator or cause you to fail an inspection. In the meantime, you’ll pay higher prices for them than you used to.
2. Point solutions. “You can have a solution for each end point,” Bequette said. “You can have a fire panel with cellular built into it. You can have a separate solution for emergency phones. Replace each individual endpoint with something that doesn’t require copper anymore.”
3. POTS replacement. Some manufacturers offer devices that essentially replace all the functions copper is covering for you now.
8 Considerations for Choosing a POTS Replacement
If you decide to opt for the all-in-one approach, Bequette recommended these criteria to consider when you’re interviewing vendors.
1. Use Case Coverage
Can your POTS replacement provide a signal across your entire portfolio? This is an especially crucial consideration if you’re buying a cellular solution, which is the case with most POTS replacements. “If you’re buying from AT&T or T-Mobile, do they cover all the properties you need to cover?” Bequette asked.
Also ask whether the provider has experience with your specific models of equipment. Fire alarms, for example, can be 40 years old or more. “Show them the model numbers,” Bequette said. “Have you had success with this device before? You’ll know up front.”
2. Regulatory Compliance
Your POTS replacement should be compliant with the relevant codes and standards—for example, NFPA 72 for fire panels or ASME A17.1B for elevators. Ask the vendor about them. “Are you compliant when the fire marshal comes out and I have to have a headache and deal with this?” Bequette asked. “Or are they going to say, ‘We’ve seen this before. Looks good’?”
3. Remote Management
If you manage a portfolio, you’re probably not going to make an appearance at every property every day—and even if you do, you’re not going to go into each elevator in every property, press the emergency button and check for a dial tone. A POTS replacement provider should give you a way to see what devices you have installed and whether there are any errors or notifications you need to know about.
4. Redundancy
“This is key because we’re talking about life safety,” Bequette said. “If somebody’s stuck in an elevator, the last thing you want is for it not to work. If there’s a fire and the fire panel needs to communicate, it needs to work.”
A cellular solution should have redundancy for both power and its network, Bequette said. A battery backup should keep it operating in case the power goes out. For the cellular signal, find out what will happen if the primary cell signal goes down. Some vendors offer products with two separate cellular networks, so you could have AT&T as a primary provider and Verizon as the secondary, for example. Other solutions may have a cellular signal as the primary network and your building ethernet as the backup.
5. Installation and Flexibility
Your vendor should be flexible enough to understand that you probably don’t have an inventory of every copper line in your building—many owners and managers don’t.
“You may or may not know what you’re using right now,” Bequette said. “You may have 30 lines and 10 aren’t in use—they’ve been disconnected over the years and nobody keeps track of it. If you say, ‘I think I have 30 lines, but I don’t really know what they’re going to,’ is the vendor OK with saying, ‘That’s fine, we’re going to tone and tag the lines, install what’s there and only bill you for what you actually need’? Or is that work going to go onto you?”
6. Support
Any vendor you choose for this important replacement should have 24/7/365 availability because this has to do with life safety. “You want a service level agreement for response time,” Bequette said. “You don’t want somebody who’s going to take three days, or even 12 hours, to get back to you. Somebody has to respond right away.”
If your fire panel stops communicating on a Saturday morning and you have to have someone patrol your building looking for fires, that will get expensive fast, Bequette added. A guaranteed quick response can save you money, time and energy. “You don’t want customers, especially with an elevator, wondering why somebody is patrolling back and forth looking for fires all day,” he said.
7. Reputation
Any time there’s a defined need to do something, as with copper wire replacement, fly-by-night companies pop up, Bequette said. Understand how long the provider you’re talking to has been around and whether they’re likely to have longevity in the marketplace. If they’re an older company, have they been offering a POTS replacement solution for a while, or is this a new offering for them that they could easily stop servicing if it’s not adding enough to their bottom line?
Also understand the scale of the company, as this can affect support capability. “If they have 10 employees and you have 500 properties, they are not capable of supporting the scale you have,” Bequette said.
8. Upfront and Recurring Costs
Understand everything you’ll need to pay for and use that information to compare companies, Bequette suggested. Do they have zero CapEx options where you can make the switch without spending a lot of money upfront?
Be sure to investigate activation fees and charges. It’s not necessarily a bad thing if a company charges an activation fee, but you should understand what they are upfront and how the fees of different providers compare to each other. Some vendors might also include taxes (which can be substantial with telecom services) in their estimates for you, while others might leave it off, so make sure you understand what’s represented in the invoice as you compare vendors. The quote should also include the cost of any support if it’s provided as a separate service.
Hardware costs can also vary, and you’ll want to know whether you’re buying or renting the devices.
“Understand what you’ll get billed for and compare apples to apples,” Bequette urged.
