What partners learned about replacing aging phone lines, and how to bring it to customers

FluentStream kicked off the year with a partner webinar introducing AirDial, a POTS replacement solution for the fire alarms, elevator phones, fax machines, and other equipment still running on copper phone lines. POTS stands for Plain Old Telephone Service, the analog wiring that has connected buildings to the phone network for decades. The session covered why those lines are going away, how AirDial works, and how partners can bring it to customers, along with pricing, install options, and the partner referral program. Here’s a recap of what stood out.

The conversation started with the copper sunset. Carriers have been asking to step away from aging copper networks as repairs on those lines can take a long time, and AT&T has said it plans to wind down its copper network by the end of 2029, with Verizon, Frontier, Windstream, and CenturyLink moving in the same direction. Pricing protections have loosened too. In one example, a business with 12 POTS lines was paying about $100 per line until a rate notice, buried in an invoice that went straight to accounts payable, added a surcharge that pushed each line to roughly $1,000. By the time the increase was caught and a replacement was in place, two months of higher bills had added up to about $25,000.

AirDial is a single box built for the systems that can’t afford to fail. It’s installed where the old phone lines enter the building, and the existing wiring connects to four ports on the unit. Traffic travels over LTE through major carrier partners, and a small screen shows signal strength and battery status. With ethernet connected as well, calls get extra protection. MultiPath technology sends every voice packet over both paths at once, so a call stays up if one connection is interrupted. A web portal adds alerts for outages and battery events, and larger buildings can stack units to avoid a single point of failure.

How to Bring AirDial to Your Customers

The webinar encouraged partners to look beyond IT. Many customers say they’ve already moved to the cloud, but some analog lines were left behind. The people who know about them are often facilities managers and alarm dealers, so start there. Questions about signal and approvals are common, and the team covered how to answer them. With carrier timelines moving quickly, now is a good time to review your own book of business.