HITT- POTS replacement strategies and market insights- Mar 4, 2025

In this HITT, industry experts discussed the lucrative yet overlooked market of POTS replacement. With major carriers ceasing payments on POTS lines and increasing rates, the burden of maintaining old infrastructure has shifted to consumers, leading to significant price hikes and service degradation. The panel emphasized the importance of identifying cost-saving opportunities for clients, particularly in life safety communications, and highlighted effective sales techniques for uncovering these opportunities. As the industry shifts away from outdated technologies, partners are encouraged to conduct audits and explore new solutions to help clients navigate these changes.

Transcript is auto-generated.

Today’s hit presentation includes information by industry experts, Dave Hanron. He’s senior national channel manager at Granite, and Dave Beagle, senior manager of strategic sales at Ooma, and all of it expertly hosted by Graeme Scott, Telarus VP of Advanced Networking and Mobility.

Graeme, always a pleasure to welcome you back to today, our Fat Tuesday call. How are you?

I’m great, Doug. Thanks so much. It’s always great to be here. It’s been been a little bit, it feels like, you know, but, always good to be here on the Tuesday call. Appreciate everybody joining us here today.

So, yeah, we’re talking about Potts replacement here today. And before we jump in, I wanna sort of point out the obvious here. We’ve got Dave and Dave on the call here. So we’re gonna make sure that we’re gonna refer everybody by their last name to avoid any confusion.

So, Beagle and Hanrin, we’re happy to have you guys here with us. I’ll bring these guys in in just a couple of minutes. But, Chandler, if you wanna go ahead and forward to the slide. So we’re talking about pots replacement here.

Right? And I know it’s not the most sexy product that’s in the marketplace, but the reality is there is still a ton of money being made in this space. So when we were doing our year end review session planning, Josh Hazlehorst, myself, and Britton, one of the sessions we wanted to add at the end there that we never got the time to get to was, what’s kind of the low hanging fruit that’s out there in the advanced network and mobility space. The area where partners were making a ton of money without a lot of fanfare, and both Brent and Josh and I all agreed that it was Potts replacement.

Still a ton of money to be made out there. There’s still so much going on. So even though we already talked about this topic almost exactly a year ago, wanted to revisit it because in addition to still being a tremendous opportunity, we had kind of a watershed moment that happened earlier this year when one of the major carriers dropped POTS lines from their compensation.

So, that carrier shall remain nameless, but if you were getting, commissions from POTS lines from the major carriers, might wanna check those commission reports because one of them has dropped it from their commission. No fanfare, no announcement, just no longer paying on POTS lines. And of course, we knew this was coming, we knew this was happening, so it’s not really a surprise, but it is here. The day is here.

So given that news, I thought what better time to bring back some of our, industry experts here, a couple of the guys that we know are having tremendous success in this space. And, of course, it goes without saying that we’ve got a lot of providers in the Telarus portfolio that offer POTS replacement. But two of the most popular solutions are, the Epic Box through Granite and the Airdial solution through Ooma. So wanted to bring both those guys on here today to talk through that.

And Today, we’re gonna focus primarily on how to sell this stuff. If you go back and look at the call we did about a year ago, we really focused on the technical aspects of the solution, where it’s being deployed, how it’s being deployed, how it works. So if you wanna learn about that, go ahead back into the archives. As Doug said, all of these calls are recorded and you can check that out and find that session.

But today, we’re gonna focus mostly on the sales. So Chandler, if you wanna go ahead and go to the next slide. So let me quickly recap how we got here. In twenty nineteen, the FCC deregulated copper lines, which allowed suppliers like AT and T, Verizon, Lumen, all these folks that have copper lines out there to phase out support.

And, they basically mandated that there’d be a shift to newer alternatives by August second of twenty twenty two. Of course, that date has passed, So we are well into the thick of it right now. And why? Well, the goal was to replace old infrastructure with more modern technologies such as fiber and wireless to support the newer digital applications that were coming out. So bottom line of this is carriers were no longer required to cover the expense and burden of maintaining old copper networks.

As such, that burden has now been passed on to customers, the consumers. So what have we seen since last year? And Chandler, you can go ahead and forward for me. So what’s happening?

As I touched on to start here, carriers have, some of them have, and all the rest of them will stop paying on existing copper lines. So I know there was some hesitancy out there with some of the partners that we had, that were, you know, hey. Look. I’m still getting paid on these things.

I don’t wanna switch them out. Well, that is coming to an end. Already one carrier has said so, and, a lot of the others are gonna follow suit. So that is something to keep an eye on.

Check out your commission statements. Make sure that you’ve got an alternative in place when that commission drops off if you’ve sold some copper lines. Number two, there are still millions of these out there, and this is courtesy of Granite gave us this information.

Over sixty percent of alarm lines in the US are still analog, meaning pots, and that’s according to the m NFPA.

And there’s over nine hundred thousand, some say closer to a million elevator lanes out there in the US, and that’s according to the national elevator industry. So there’s still a ton of opportunity out there. And as I started out the call by saying, so many partners are doing very, very well in this space. It’s kinda one of those best kept secrets.

So what else is happening? Well, POTS lines are becoming more expensive because the FCC and state regulars have removed all price caps and all regulation, carriers are taking full advantage, and this has led to significant rates. And I’m gonna come and touch on that in a minute with the Beagle from Ooma.

Next thing we’re seeing, the quality of service is declining. Right? Because the carriers are not required to maintain the plan, the carriers are simply maximizing the opportunity with a captive audience, and they are investing nothing in the, the repair of this infrastructure.

So you’re seeing clients paying more and getting less for what they’re doing. Last thing we’re seeing, a lot of non compliant solutions are being rolled out there.

You know, consumers when faced with a high bill or poor service are rushing for an alternative, and sometimes they’re putting in solutions that don’t meet their compliance needs, which is causing huge liability issues. So these are some of the things we’re seeing in the industry. All of this leads to massive opportunity for you. Chandler, if you wanna go and switch to the next slide.

Mister Beagle, I’m gonna ask you to come in and chime on this. This one was provided by you. This goes to my third point where consumers are paying a ton more for POTS lines than they were. Tell us what you guys are seeing out there in the space.

Yeah. Thanks, Graeme. I mean, this is this is significant, right, with that deregulation.

People don’t realize that they may be paying more than they really need to because a lot of times these POTS lines specifically, when we’re talking about the fire life safety environment, it’s usually a couple lines. Typically, they’re going right to the department. They’re just signing the check and sending it out. This example that you’re seeing here on the screen is actually through one of our clients.

They’ve never noticed as their bill was coming in. They were paying a hundred dollars a line. Right? The bill came in.

The AP department wrote the check, sent it, but what they missed was there was a notice of rate increase that was embedded in that invoice.

The following month, they found an additional nine hundred dollar per line surcharge that was added. Their contracted rates stayed the same. It was the fees and surcharges that were added, effectively making it a thousand dollars. And while this is, per line, while this is extreme, this is this is indicative of what we’re seeing across the board, whether it’s any any to any of the incumbents, anywhere from sixty to six hundred or four hundred to, you know, even twelve hundred.

You know, we’re seeing really significant increases. But listen, at the end of the day, if your client gets hit by this, they’re exposed to they’re exposed to the cost. This is areas that they could save money. It’s low hanging fruit that they can repurpose in other areas.

In this particular example, twenty five grand. Right? One month that they pay, the second month by the time they find another solution to get it implemented, they’re exposed to twenty five grand. That twenty five grand could be certainly used for an AI initiative or a cybersecurity initiative or some other areas.

So we’re spending a lot of time in educating the advisors on where you can find some of that pocket money to repurpose into other areas. But, yeah, check with check with facilities. Check with AP department. It’s not always people aren’t really paying attention to the cost of the analog line right now.

Yeah. And I think sometimes, Dave or Beagle, just to kind of touch on this, we’re also seeing some kind of shenanigans happening here sometimes with the way these fees are hidden on the bills. Right? Like, it’s not always obvious that the change is tied to the POTS line itself. Sometimes you’ll see it as an admin fee or something like that that’s on there. Right?

That’s right. That’s absolutely correct. And that’s how they get by the contracted rates. Right? Is is to add these surcharges in there.

So you have to do look at your bills and, you know, I I I know, you know, Henry and and us, we’re we’re all very alike. Like, if you wanna send over examples of bills for us to look at, we’re happy to do that. We wanna assist you in in identifying those cost savings.

Yeah. And just to touch on a point there that was made by Sean, this is happening pretty universally across a number of carriers. This is not just one carrier. So just something to keep an eye on. Great place to start. Take a look at the bill.

Ask your clients. Hey. Have you guys seen a rate increase or increase in cost in some in your telecom bills? They might not know what it’s attributed to.

Right? So helping them dig in there a little bit is gonna help. Let’s pivot here a little bit to my fourth point. And, Chandler, if you wanna move the slide here for me, here’s kind of an example of some of the plants that are out there.

And, Dave, you provided a couple images. I actually swapped one out to that cabinet. But, Hanrin, tell me a little bit about how this is. Like, what’s going on out here in the field with the condition of these cabinets and these lines that are in the ground?

You got sent this by a friend of yours that works for one of the major carriers up there in the northeast. Right?

Correct. Correct. I think and this address is a question I saw to Zachary, Schechter just popped up in the in the chat talking about the degraded the degradation of the network. So what this is is is, as you said earlier, Graeme, a lot of the companies are no longer repairing these services.

So what you’re looking at here in the cable, this is a five hundred pair cable that the the LEC is working on here. And when they get a repair on something like this, they don’t go out and replace this. They merely search through the rat’s nest you see here, and they try to find a pair that hasn’t either corroded or hasn’t broken somewhere along the services, and they just reuse it. And, eventually, as you can see from this mess that they’re working on today, it’s it’s difficult to tone out, you know, working pairs.

So it’s it’s really become a chore for the for the bell companies to maintain this, and that’s one of the reasons they’re getting out of it.

Yeah.

And then if you look at that picture there of the cabinet and I know, Dave, this is one that I you guys can see the little Reddit logo there. I saw on a little Reddit forum that was talking about this and, just a rat’s nest of of stuff going on here. And what were you telling me about the wood that they use in the pipes there, Dave? So, Hanron, something about how the moisture and it’s just they’re not replacing it, so these lines are just corroding.

Yeah. So if you think back to where this all started, right, I think the first major impact that we saw was back in, I believe, was two thousand twelve when Sandy hit New York, right, and created all the flooding. So all the coastal areas flooded. Boston, as an example, you know, Granite’s headquartered up there, so I’m familiar with Boston.

The Seaport area of Boston has also flooded. And when it floods, the water gets down into the manholes where all this copper runs through. And these manholes can sometimes be three or four levels deep. And the deeper you get, the more, you know, the salt water stays in those manholes.

And salt water is the enemy of anything metal.

And clearly, copper is a soft metal and it gets corroded and it rusts and it starts to to break and fill. So what they used to do a hundred years ago when they installed this stuff, they’d put these cables in and they would put, like, a pulp type coating on it, and then they would encase that in lead. So pulp, if you think of pulp, from a building structure today, if you think pressed wood, right, when you see that plywood out there, most of the houses now are made out of pressed wood, which is, you know, water is the enemy of that stuff. So that’s no different than the pulp encasement that they used around the copper back a hundred years ago.

When it gets wet, it just absorbs it and it’s like a sponge and it says stays wet. So if you think back to what you used to see on the streets, remember you used to see the manholes open. You’d see the the little, the little frame around the manholes with those big yellow tubes going down into the manholes. That was when the Bell companies would get on and try to dry the cables off by blowing air through the through the ducts down there.

And they don’t do that anymore. Ever since the FCC said they don’t have to regulate it anymore or repair it, that stopped. You know? You very rarely see one of those tubes anymore unless somebody’s down there.

Well, you know, like, working when they need air. So that’s what’s caused a lot of this stuff. So you’re absolutely right that it needs to be replaced with some newer technology, and that’s kinda where we are today.

Yeah. So let’s kinda just recap here briefly. Right? We’ve got a scenario where customers are paying a ton more, and I appreciate everybody dropping their examples in the chat here. We’ve got a whole bunch of them just to back up what you were showing there, Beagle. Lot of scenarios. Nick had one eight thousand percent increase.

Insane. Right? So, you know, customers are paying a ton more, and half the time, the stuff’s not even working properly, right, because the plant has degraded so poorly that we’ve got a real bad scenario there. So, Chandler, I’m gonna go ahead and ask you to take the slides down.

Let’s just bring up the pictures of our two panelists here so we can have a little conversation. But, guys, let’s start talking sales techniques. Right? How do we open up the conversation?

How are we uncovering these opportunities and finding opportunity finding, like an area where we can start to converse there? So, Beagle, I’ll start with you. Are there specific industries that you guys are targeting? Are there specific, you know, types of businesses where you guys are finding more success than others?

Well, first and foremost, there’s not a vertical that this doesn’t apply to because because every business usually has a couple copper lines. Right? Now the areas that we’re seeing significant success on the larger scales are like those RIOTS, right, or those HOAs where they have, you know, very distributed environments where they’ve got a lot of buildings they’re managing. It’s also school districts.

It’s a lot of hospitality, right, where they have elevators, alarms, you know, all of those type of things. So we’re seeing wide degree of success across all those verticals. Now that being said, you know, when you’re when you’re looking to uncover these opportunities, sometimes the people we’re talking to every day, they don’t really know. They’re you know, I I highlighted earlier on the pricing thing.

Sometimes you gotta get to the facilities person. Right? The facilities person who is responsible for the alarm panels of the elevators, they typically will know what they’re connected to, how they’re connected, and having that conversation with them becomes paramount, not only from your perspective, from an advisor perspective, but internally to your your decision maker perspective.

Now the one thing that I would say is most everybody knows that pots are going away. They just don’t know when, and they don’t know the impact that they’re having, and, you know, they get surprised by it. The question that I always love to lead with is, what is your strategy for replacing the copper lines for your fire life safety environment? That open ended question really does drive a few return questions back, like, what do you mean if they don’t know?

Right? You get to explain what’s happening in the industry. It could be, hey. Well, listen.

We’re we already got it figured out. Okay. How do you have it figured out? Right?

I think that one of the questions in here was about, you know, what how do you how do you combat the alarm panel guys who already have solution or say, hey, you know, we’re gonna put in a module. Well, module might work, but if you got multiple POTS devices like a epic box or an air dial box, it’s multipurpose. You can you can you can manage all all these other things. It covers further opportunities, but more importantly, a modules, they’re LTE driven primarily.

You got a primary LTE provider. You can come in there and talk about resiliency and the redundancy and really kind enforce that. This is for fire life safety. You don’t wanna have a single point of failure when you go in with a with a single LTE provider and things like that.

You wanna cover a whole series of things, and I know I’m going a little bit deep, but I I talk a lot. I’m a sales guy like we all are.

But I would do wanna drive information for folks. Right? And so happy to help.

Yeah. And I think sometimes the alarm guy, you know, watching that might be a little like the fox watching the hen house a little bit, you know? So we maybe like a little bit of, diversity there. So, Hanrin, you made a you made a really good point when we were having our pre call.

You said that a lot of this stuff is left over from UCaaS, you know, transformations that happened, you know, how many years ago. And, you know, we just kinda said, hey, let’s just leave these complicated life safety or or these copper lines, alarm panels, faxes, whatever they are. Let’s just leave them alone and come back to them because at the time, UCaaS may have not been a good solution to go there. You guys are seeing a lot of that.

Right, Dave?

Yeah. I I see a ton of that happening. We will get a customer that calls up and says, jeez. I have, you know, I have a UCaaS solution in here, but I’m I’m still getting this bill from the Bell company.

And all of a sudden, it’s, you know, like like Beagle said, it’s jumped five hundred percent in the last three months. You know, what can I do about this? And what it’s caused is it’s I think it’s really created a wonderful opportunity for the adviser to go back and do what they do best with the client, which is, you know, consult with them and say, hey, guys. I know you moved to this VoIP solution, UCaaS solution several years ago.

But at the time, we never dealt with your life safety lines, and we left them behind. Now it’s time that we need to go in and do something with them. So let’s talk about a plan to address that. Because now you’re going back and you’re taking that bill that Beagle just talked about that jumped up, I think it was seven hundred and something percent.

And now you can reduce that back down to a reasonable number very quickly, which is exactly what the adviser does that proves value and it reinforces your relationship with the client, makes you an important part of their business.

Absolutely. And, Hamron, before before we, move to another question here, quick thoughts on some of the stuff you guys are seeing to uncover opportunities, tips, tricks, other questions.

Specific industry, where you or or you would you pretty much agree with what Beagle is saying that this is pretty universal?

I I think it’s I think it’s universal, really, because I think every business has to have some type of a life safety fire alarm line in there. Right? You’ve either got a burglar alarm or you’ve got a fire alarm, and a lot of that is required by occupancy code. So pretty much any business is gonna have a couple lines in there that they have to deal with.

Now, yes, it’s possible that you’ve got the alarm company in there that’s trying to go in with a cellular module, but that only that doesn’t work with every panel. If you’ve got an old panel in there back from the eighties, those cellular network modules aren’t gonna work. So they’ve gotta put some type of a part replacement box in there. So it is something we’ve gotta address.

Yeah. It it’s also worth noting if I can jump in here. When we talk about fire life safety, it’s not just fire panels, alarm panels, or elevators. Right?

There’s a whole series of POTS endpoints that can be considered fire life safety. You know, it’s emergency call boxes or the blue light phones. You know, you find these in storage facilities, parking garages. I mean, you find them in municipalities and schools, etcetera.

Those are considered safety devices. Right?

Same with, like, analog failover to the premises solution, the Avaya’s, the Mitel’s, you know, whatnot. Again, you know, there’s an application here, faxing. There’s applications for sure in that area. And a lot of these monitoring things, it may not necessarily be fire life safety, but they could be. And that’s you think about, like, these gas meters, oil rooms, HVACs, you know, that that have these analog lines for out of band management capabilities. So it’s not just those couple. There there’s a whole series or whole whole suite of opportunities for advisers to get in there and talk about.

Yeah. No. I think that’s really important. And and sometimes, Beagle, you you actually don’t always transition all the POTS lines they have.

Right? Sometimes when you guys get in there, you find, hey, look. There’s ten lines here that you guys aren’t really using for anything. Here’s the lines that are important.

We’ll go ahead and transition those over to the to the airdial solution or the epic in the case of Granite or or, you know, whatever other solution we’re looking at. And you’re gonna uncover a ton of cost savings beyond just the transition. So talk a little bit about what that process looks like.

Yeah. It’s a great point because we get in there and and, you know, we go back to that that that that rat’s nest. Right? There’s so many lines that people don’t even know what they’re connected to.

They just don’t touch them. And because the cost historically was pretty friendly, they just didn’t they didn’t worry about it. Right? But now that it’s getting crazy, they’ve got to go in there and do these audits, if you will.

They have to identify what lines are actually mission critical and which ones they can eliminate, in in, you know, both of us, you know, Hanra and I, you know, our companies, we do a very good job of going in there and doing that that assessment. Right? And, you know, that is additional money. It doesn’t have to always be converted from that perspective.

You know, we’ve also had cases where, you know, I I’m thinking of one in the southeast where we did, like, I I think it was, like, almost seven, eight hundred lines that was specifically for fax use. But now they’re going back and say, hey. We could plug in the alarm panels now that our contracts are coming up there. And and so, you know, again, having a multipurpose device where you could add lines to it, you know, you future proofing in some of these environments, right, from that perspective as well.

Yeah. No. Good point. And, Hanrin, talk a little bit about because, you know, I think a lot of people when I’m talking about pots, they think about granite. Right? Because you guys have thousands of these things out there in the marketplace.

You guys do the transition a little bit differently. Right, Dave? So talk a little or Hanrin. So talk a little bit about how you guys kind of approach that initial transition phase. I see some questions in here about an audit. I think you would agree that that’s important, right, Dave, Anron, to do that audit. But then what does it look like after that?

Yeah. I mean I mean, that’s a good point. I mean, Granite was fortunate enough to be in a good spot. I mean, we were always the eight hundred pound gorilla in the parts aggregation space.

We we just we we played in that big enterprise level retail area. So we were able to you know, at our peak, we had a million plus POTS line, I think, a million and a half POTS lines under our program.

That has declined.

But what hasn’t declined is the fact that we are still the largest customers for a lot of the Bell companies. So what that’s done is it’s given us leverage to maintain those contracts, those wholesale agreements with the Bell companies. So we have a little different approach to this. We give the customers the ability to get an immediate rate stability program by just flipping the lines, doing a traditional POTS flip over to granite.

Because our contracts, we’ve just renewed them actually for another three years, But we have no end date in sight with regular pot lines. We’re able to take the customer’s inventory, flip it immediately, anything that’s on Bell. You know, that’s not a resale I like line. We can flip those over to Granite immediately, give them price stability, and then let them move and it goes on a month to month contract so they can move those lines whenever they want.

But they can then move to parts replacement or a UCaaS solution at their own pace as opposed to being forced into it and having to make a hasty decision. So that’s allowed us to do it a little differently.

Yeah. And Beagle, the air dial solution has been, you know, by far one of the most successful out there in the market.

Talk a little bit about what that transition looks like going from a POTS tip to, the air dial. How you get like, what that kinda looks like. I mean, I know it’s a little different from the sense that it’s not a POTS to POTS and then you guys go right to the air dial. So talk a little bit about how that works.

There’s a there’s a couple of things that we did with so first of all, the air dial is built. It’s it’s it’s purpose built by us to to address these scenarios. And we just in a, you know, just last week at a at a press release where we just got a Frost and Sullivan award for best practices for box replacement, something we’re proud of. We spend a lot of emphasis in really trying to simplify the approach for box replacement. Like, for example, you look at the back of the device, which I have one right here, you know, it’s got it’s got RJ eleven plug in. So it makes it very easy to take a standard POTS endpoint and plug it right in, or reterminate it in that RJ eleven and go into it. So, you know, our approach is keep it as simple as possible.

Sixty five percent of our client base does a self install because of that. And and and then provide a lot of the tools and and visibility and management functionality that you historically didn’t have for POTS, so a cloud based portal. So that you can actually manage all those endpoints. You can actually label it from an asset, you know, back to the rat’s nest knowing what’s connected to what.

But being able to go in there and configure e nine one one at the port level for campus environment so that emergency personnel go to the right place. Setting up proactive alerts. So if your device goes out of service, your pots line is down or or maybe it kicks into a a battery, which is another thing that is is you know, when we talk about these non compliant solutions, you know, you have to have power continuity for the device adheres to NFPA and things like that. But, you know, we wanna give you alerts for that and call notifications if you’re in the emergent if you have an emergency or in the elevator and you press a button.

Let’s send out notifications to folks that you’ve designated. Right? So there’s a lot of different things. But when we go in, you know, a typical eighty twenty rule, typical you’re gonna see in one location probably three box lines.

It’s gonna be a fire alarm, maybe an elevator, maybe a fax or whatnot. A lot of times, again, if you’re talking to the right folk within the organization, they know what’s connected, what’s connected to what. You just go in and we just do the deployment right away, right? It just get it done.

And now more complex environments, we can go in there, we can do the assessments, we can do the site surveys, you know, but a lot of times not necessarily needed. Just really kind of depends on the environment. But we have tried our best, it’s in the DNA of our company, to make this as simple as possible and to give you good management functionality.

Yeah. Love it. And, Hanran, touch on, the Epic Box a little bit. One of the only acquisitions Granite’s ever made in the history of the company. Right? If not the only acquisition, if I’m not mistaken.

Talk a little bit about the the module itself, been very successful, especially in some of those areas you talked about earlier, retail, class a tower, some of that. So talk a little bit about the Epic Box and how it’s a little different.

Yeah. So the Epic Box is the only acquisition that Granite has ever made in our twenty two year history.

We didn’t buy it for the company. We didn’t buy it for the revenue. It was a very small company, but the technology was something that we looked at and, you know, we just decided that this is the solution that we wanted to go.

When we acquired it, we were able to build it out to scale.

And, you know, the the once once we got it up and rolling and understood the technology, we were able to build it pretty rapidly and start deploying it for large, you know, pretty much unlimited type size rollouts.

As you mentioned, right, there’s a lot of different pot solution on the market.

The difference between Epic and all of the other solutions, and Epic owns the we own the patent on this, is Epic is the only box that is actually doing the switching on premise. So So the epic epic box has a class five soft switch built into the edge device that we put on-site, and it does all of the various routing and and all of that type of selection on prem. It’s got the battery built backup battery built into the box. It’s got the modem built into the box. It’s got the switching smarts intelligence built into the box as opposed to having to go out to the cloud. So it connects directly to the PSTN from the box.

That’s that’s a major difference on the Epic box.

And I think, you know, just as I talked about earlier, both these guys just touched on the products differ like, you know, just briefly, if you want more of a deep dive on that, that’s really what we covered in our last pot session, so you can go ahead and check that out. We’re starting to wind down here, guys. So, Beagle, I’m gonna start with you. You know, any gotchas that tech advisors gotta be kind of on the lookout for as they start these conversations?

What kind of things should they be aware of? What do they wanna make sure that they’re ticking the boxes? Boxes? Just taking that extra step, like, something that’s maybe surprised you, jumped out at you, and, you know, maybe a gotcha out there that they gotta be aware of.

I I don’t think it’s indicative of this community per se, but I would say overall in the industry, we do see people who have simplified this, this approach in the standpoint of it’s just a POTS line. Right? So therefore, we could just put an ATA for an elevator, for example. So the gotchas here really are to make sure you understand when we say pots in a box for the fire life safety environment, make sure you understand what that environment, what entails so that when you are advising your client, you are the subject matter expert where you’re bringing in the experts for it.

Don’t just take the easy route on this. It’s not as easy as we all like to make it be. There is some complexity. Listen, you know, we think about computers and software.

Right? You know, and and Hanra hit on it earlier. We got some old panels out there from the eighties that we run into. Sometimes you have to upgrade your hardware.

Right? You’re not gonna put a Windows eleven on a nine three eighty six machine. Right? But unfortunately, there are people out there who still feel like, well, I should be able to repurpose all this old stuff.

Many times you can. But we do you know, that’s probably one of the biggest scotches is really identifying again, back to facilities in the right context internally. Identifying what are you connecting to so that we can make sure we’re delivering the appropriate solution. Right?

You know, the air dial, we have, you know, impedance and voltage settings at the port level to make sure we’re connecting to the right thing. We have firmware that adjusts for modem based, you know, for some of the, buffering for modem based connections. We have a lot of different variables to what it needs to connect to, and we just you know, I think the biggest gotchas don’t oversimplify this. We we don’t wanna look dumb.

I get it. But at the same time, ask some relevant questions and use us. Use us from that perspective. The other last thing I would leave here real quick, Graeme, and because I saw a couple, questions in here.

You know, one of the things back to, you know, like some of the alarm panels or some of the other things, when we talk these environments, we talk about that resiliency aspect, you know, I’ll use AirDoll as an example. We have what we call multipath transport. If you plug in the Ethernet, we’ll transmit every voice packet over both LTE and the Ethernet and so it’s true active active so that if one of those routes is impacted it stays up and active. Now that’s a great selling point because if you’re out there and you’re combating, you know, some of the other alarm panels or some of the other things you get to talk about, hey, well listen that’s great but is that really the solution you want Because we’ve got others that really kind of highlight that.

And again, back to the liability, the insurance things, you know, there’s a myriad of stuff that we can guide you, to really kind of drive in deeper.

Yeah. And and before we bring Doug in here to handle the question and answer period for us, Hanron, what are you guys seeing out there? Any gotchas you gotta be aware of? Any things that you guys I mean, you guys do a ton of these. Like, what are you seeing out there? Anything, tech advisers need to be aware of before they start to have these conversations?

Yeah. I think Beagle hit on one point I wanted to make. That active active is critical because they call them life safety lines for a reason. Right?

They want them to work when you need them to work. The last thing you wanna be is in a life’s critical situation, have the call drop because it’s active passive. You don’t wanna redial. So that’s critical.

So I agree with him a hundred percent on that. The other thing that I think is that that you need to be aware of, and this isn’t so much a got you as a more be aware of this, is because of the you guys saw the bill that Beagle put up at the start. Right? Those are significant cost increases. And think of that if you’ve got even more lines.

What we’ve seen a lot is that because of this pots dilemma, it’s actually put the brakes on other projects that you might be working on. Like, you could be working on a a cybersecurity deal or you could be working on a on a, you know, big UCaaS deal or whatever it may be. And all of a sudden, the CFO sees this. Hey.

Wait a minute. I’ve just gone from a thousand dollar parts bill to a forty thousand dollar parts bill. I need to fix this right away. So, you know, that puts the brakes on your other project while he looks at the parts.

So if you address the parts upfront and you go in as that adviser that I talked about doing earlier, that role is critical in in the multi project thing. So it doesn’t put breaks on something else. So just be aware of that. I think that can because that can turn into a gotcha pretty quick.

Yeah. And I think great point there, Dave, Hanron, because, you know, yeah, you can also free up money for projects, you know, by looking at some of this stuff, and I think both of you guys hit on that.

Gentlemen, thanks so much. Doug, bringing in you here, we got a ton of questions in the in the chat.

You know, who knew pots replacement would would be such a a hotbed of activity here? But, again, always a popular one, tons of low hanging fruit. So what do we got here?

I think you knew, Graeme.

Great information today. And, yeah, there are a ton of questions. A lot of really good ones as well. Wanted to go to a couple that John Vargo asked quickly because, he mentioned a couple of things that I thought were really interesting.

Earlier, we noted that some of the businesses that we’re trying to work with may not necessarily be in charge of some of the infrastructure that they have, whether those are the risers, the other copper infrastructure, or even the the doors or alarms or whatever else that are involved with that.

Let’s talk just a little bit about how to address that, and I’m guessing that because most of the solutions are not necessarily dependent on some of the existing infrastructure that we have some options?

Go ahead, Beagle.

Yeah. You know, when you think of, like, malls, for example. Right? They’re not necessarily the the tenants aren’t necessarily the property owners.

And so we do if we have to do a pots replacement, we do need to get to the to the building owners, right, to the to the people responsible for the overall maintenance of the in the environment. So it’s really making that introduction. That being said, a lot of these retailers do have pots internally that can still be operated independently, you know, because we are driving by LTE as our primary path. And so, you know, when you go over LTE, you can bypass some of those things, you know, POS systems, again, faxing, you know, some of these other elements within the business.

So it is something that you do have to consider until you can get to the right, you know, the right way. Class a buildings are the same thing when you think about CBRE, Cushman, Wakefield, and and companies like that.

John also mentioned, campus environments as well.

Similar but very different in terms of the, the breadth and the possibilities of what’s out there.

Absolutely. Yeah. And and campus environments? Yeah. Go ahead, Andrew. Yeah. Don’t mean to jump. Yeah.

No. I I I think you also need to remember a lot of the infrastructure isn’t needed with POS replacement because you’re plugging into an Ethernet port, which is typically separate from that. So as long as you’ve got Internet in the building, you can plug that into the back of the box. And then, you know, primary, it goes out over the Ethernet of some sort, whether it’s broadband or, you know, might be DIA, whatever it may be. And then if it fails, it can go over either cellular or LTE, which doesn’t really require infrastructure unless you have to put a hole in a roof of the wall for an antenna. So that’s really the only time we really find we have to deal with the property owners.

Let’s talk a little bit more about these audits. I’ve personally been through that with a number of the partners that I work with. We see it all the time. A couple of questions that are coming up. Is it better to try to do that internally with the business? Or in some cases, is it better to outsource that to someone who does that professionally?

Scott, I I you want me to start, Bigel?

Yeah. Go for it, man.

So it’s kinda you kinda have to look at inventories in two different manners. Right? If it’s just a few plot lines that you need to figure out, then we do that as part of the install. We’ll go out there and see we’ll figure out what they have.

So we double dispatch on it. We’ll dispatch once to go out and see exactly what the landscape looks like. And at that point, we’ll check and see what the inventory looks like, and we’ll be able to do that. However, if you go in there and it’s a it’s a big business or something and you want a full blown inventory, then there’s a cost to that because you’ve gotta send smart hands out in the field and it’s time.

So you you do pay for a full blown audit. So it really depends off it’s just a few pot lines or if you really want a whole telecom closet audit.

By the way, that’s a great monetization opportunity for some of the advisers. Right? You know, to go in there and potentially do that. I know that we representative of some of the tems that are out there. But that’s, it’s another area that they can, we can make some money.

It seems that this is an issue where everybody’s being, affected from all sides. Commissions are going away for the advisers. Costs are going up for the, individual business owners. You’ve got the copper that’s physically degrading both in the ground and in other places.

No regulation essentially now from, traditional regulatory agencies.

And requirements that are still out there, as you mentioned, for these fire life and safety lines.

What do you tell people in terms of the urgency, and are there interim solutions if they don’t have the resources or time to go with a full blown solution at this point?

The urgency when you think about fire life safety, you can’t really put a time stamp on it because you don’t know when the emergency is going to occur. Right? So there’s that aspect of it. What I am constantly, educating on is, you know, when you think about your alarm panels or your or your elevators or whatever, now is the time to do it.

You know, don’t wait for that. Don’t wait to find out your copper line is down. We got plenty of, examples where people have had audits or or somebody’s come out to do an inspection and to find out the copper line’s down. They didn’t know it was down.

Right? And they have x amount of period to do it. This is the great this is a perfect time to go out there and put these type of solutions in.

Yeah. I think Beagle raises a really good point there. Right? Like, I I showed and Dave Hanron, and I talked a lot about the degradation of the plan itself.

You know, this stuff may not be even working, and you’re putting yourself in a situation where potentially something may happen to rely on that line and it’s not even functioning. And, you know, you call the the carrier and they’re just they’re not gonna do anything about it. So you don’t wanna be in a situation where you have to do something immediately.

Nobody likes to do something with a gun to their head. And I think, you know, you can help your customers by talking through this strategy. What are we doing? What’s our plan? To see how we’re gonna get there.

Yeah. I’d say Graeme to that point real quick is is don’t wait to be forced to do it because then you’re making rash decisions. Right? Get out there and do it now.

There’s some of these incumbents are putting out notices. You have sixty days. Right? And now you’re feeling rushed and you are pushing aside other projects.

So do it now.

Right. Your your customer is going to get that letter. We just don’t know when. Right.

So It’s coming. That’s that’s why that’s why we try to push that that that process that I was talking about earlier where you can do the bill flip over to Granite. That gets you the price stability, gets you the service stability because we can still repair them. You know, the belts are still working for another Granite contract to go out and fix lines and things.

We do run-in occasionally an area where they may not install a new service.

But, you know, for the most part, we’re still able to maintain service and stabilize the pricing. Plus, you know, we pay commission on all of the the carriers. So no issues there with us.

A couple of really good questions here having to do with we’ve talked a lot about this being a domestic issue, but are we seeing this in Canada, for example, as well? And are the same solutions available there? What are the international considerations of all this?

They’re coming. Right? So Canada is is they haven’t put out the same notices that we have here in the US, but there’s definitely a drive, to find replacements there. And so we do support Canada through a couple of our our providers up there, our LTE providers.

You’re starting to see it globally. So Europe, you know, England or either UK has announced that they’re gonna start their their pretty aggressive deprecation of those lines. While we don’t support that yet, it’s an area for sure that Ooma is looking at. We we do service globally in a lot of capacity, so it’s it’s there’s there’s definitely a market. Right?

So many opportunities here both for the actual replacement of these, but as you mentioned earlier, some of sometimes the charges associated with this can be hidden or otherwise, not as visible in certain invoices.

Check those invoices. Take a look at what’s really happening and, you know, opportunities for our advisers to help in evaluating those as well.

Yeah. I just wanna make a point about Canada as well. As a Canadian, all of our folks up in Canada know, generally speaking, you’re gonna pay more for these types of services than somebody here in the US would. So a lot of times, moving to one of these solutions is going to save them significant money over that POTS line in Canada. So, something to explore for you Canadians out there. Even though it’s being man not being mandated yet or not being, you guys aren’t being forced, there may be a cost savings opportunity there, to get off one of the bells or or whoever you’ve got in your area and save your save your clients some money.