The short answer
Most POTS line replacement projects take 60 to 120 days from first audit to final cutover. The long pole is not the hardware, it is finding every line, matching each one to its equipment, and porting the numbers. Starting a quarter ahead of any carrier disconnect date leaves room for a pilot and a clean test of every life-safety line.
Why 2026 is the year this stops being optional
Copper retirement moved from a distant policy question to a scheduled operational event. Carriers now issue discontinuance notices with firm dates, and the lines that remain carry steep month-over-month price increases in the meantime.
The organizations that get caught out are rarely the ones without a plan. They are the ones that discover, six weeks before a disconnect date, that nobody has a complete list of which analog lines exist and what each one does.
A realistic 90-day plan
| Phase | Window | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Line audit | Days 1-21 | Pull carrier bills, walk each site, map every line to its equipment and number |
| Design and quote | Days 14-30 | Choose device per site, confirm signal or circuit, fix pricing and term |
| Pilot site | Days 30-50 | One building live end to end, every line tested, alarm signals confirmed |
| Porting | Days 45-80 | Numbers submitted in batches, firm order dates confirmed per site |
| Rollout and cutover | Days 60-110 | Sites go live in waves, each with a documented test record |
| Copper disconnect | Days 90-120 | Carrier lines cancelled only after each replacement line is verified |
The line audit is the whole project
Carrier bills list numbers, not purposes. A single invoice can carry an elevator phone, a long-dead fax line, a burglar alarm circuit, and three lines nobody can account for. Every line that gets replaced without knowing its purpose becomes an outage later.
- Match each billed number to a physical jack and a piece of equipment
- Flag life-safety lines first: elevators, fire panels, area of refuge, call boxes
- Identify lines that can simply be cancelled rather than replaced
- Record which lines carry alarm signaling, fax, or modem traffic
What slows projects down
- Porting rejections caused by a name or address mismatch on the carrier account
- Life-safety lines that need an authority having jurisdiction to witness the test
- Sites with no usable wired circuit and weak in-building cellular signal
- Cancelling copper before the replacement line has been tested end to end
Budgeting the transition
An eight-line wired site runs $138 per month all in: the fixed hardware rate plus SIM connectivity, phone numbers, and 24/7 management. Install is $249 per site, waived on 36-month terms over ten lines.
Against a typical copper line at $95 per month, the same eight lines cost $760. The replacement pays for itself in the first month, which is why the audit rather than the budget is usually the gating item.
Frequently asked
Last updated 2026-09-22.