Telephone Land Lines (POTS)

Last year AT&T filed petitions with the FCC to phase out Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) or land lines.

It kind of looks like the service to your home will still be an analog connection but the switching will be IP/VoIP, meaning your service will not really go away but the way calls get switched between customers will change.

I found this article in the January issue of a trade magazine.

The article mentions interesting statistics about the decline of the land line in Michigan.

What really grabbed my attention were the statistics cited in the article. Where there were 6.6 million POTS telephone lines in Michigan in 2000, now there are 2.6 million, with 1.4 million VoIP connections. You might ask what happened to the remainder of the POTS telephone lines that were active in 2000. That answer is simple; customers are rapidly going to wireless-only telephone service, with 9.3 million Michigan cell/smart phone connections in 2012 versus 3.5 million in 2000.

Over half of the land lines that were in use in 2000 have been eliminated.  We dropped our home land lines many years ago.  The business number is now on a wireless device too.

Here is a link to another article.