Federal edict accelerates the transition from outdated telecom tech
A mandate from the Federal Communications Commission in March is compelling rural healthcare leaders to ditch their old copper phone lines.
This spring, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules that are having a real-world impact on hospitals and clinics nationwide. The FCC’s goal has been a clear one – to compel the modernization of the nation’s communications technology infrastructure for the benefit of consumers.
That initiative will put pressure on facilities – particularly those in rural areas that still rely on plain old telephone service (known by the acronym POTS) – to make rapid and expensive changes in how common devices connect and with their own communications systems.
FCC calls for change
“Today, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules that will get communities off of old and slow copper lines and onto new, high-speed networks,” The FCC’s March 26 press release noted. “Today’s actions will allow providers to retire their decades-old and increasingly expensive copper line networks, freeing up tens of billions of dollars annually for the rollout of upgraded, high-speed networks to more Americans.
“However, the expansion of these modern networks and their benefits to consumers has been hindered by the need for carriers to divert precious resources to the maintenance of deteriorating legacy networks that deliver outdated services to an ever-decreasing number of subscribers,” the news release continued. “Today’s actions reduce regulatory burdens, allowing providers to invest more resources toward modernizing their networks so all consumers can access advanced communications services.”
The FCC’s goal is to encourage investment in the most modern fiber-optic infrastructure for communications and to compel rural business organizations to adopt newer technologies. Put simply, the old copper wire lines have got to go.
As a blog posted to the website of the business phone installer firm Phonewire put it last year, “POTS lines — Plain Old Telephone Service, also called PSTN lines — are the traditional copper wire telephone connections that ran through virtually every office in America for decades. They’re a separate physical network from the Internet, powered at the telephone company’s central office, and they work even during a power outage.
“That network is being retired. Not because it stopped working, but because maintaining it has become economically unsustainable,” the article continues. “PSTN lines in the United States have collapsed from 171 million in 2005 to 11.7 million in 2024 — a 93-percent drop. Carriers are spending billions of dollars maintaining copper infrastructure for a fraction of their former customer base. AT&T alone spends approximately $6 billion annually to maintain its copper network.”
Rural hospitals feeling pressure
Patient care organizations are turning to managed VoIP, fiber optics and dedicated 4G/5G LTE cellular communicators to keep life-critical analog systems — like elevator phones and emergency panels — online. And some are turning to the FCC Rural Health Care Program for help in funding the transition.
Specifically, some are turning to the Rural Health Care Program. As noted on that program’s website, “The Rural Health Care Program is currently made up of two programs: the Healthcare Connect Fund Program and the Telecommunications Program. The Healthcare Connect Fund Program, established in 2012, provides support for high-capacity broadband connectivity to eligible healthcare providers and encourages the formation of state and regional broadband healthcare provider networks.
“Under the Rural Health Care Program, eligible rural healthcare providers, and those eligible non-rural healthcare providers that are members of a consortium that has more than 50 percent rural healthcare provider sites, receive a 65 percent flat discount on an array of communications services. These services include Internet access, dark fiber, business data, traditional digital service line (DSL) and private carriage services.
“The Telecommunications Program, established in 1997, subsidizes the difference between urban and rural rates for telecommunications services. Under the Telecommunications Program, eligible rural healthcare providers can obtain rates on telecommunications services in rural areas that are reasonably comparable to rates charged for similar services in corresponding urban areas.”
Assistance for making the switch
Senior executives at service provider companies are moving in to help hospital and clinic leaders in this area.
“The copper line telephone market is niche now,” says Timor Brik, the COO of Miami-based DataRemote. “We’ve spent the last 30 years focusing on how we can help carriers shut down their copper networks across the country, while providing an adequate replacement for the service. We think that every office phone has been replaced by a cell phone or void phone, but elevators, faxes, all sorts of tools are still relying on copper lines. It’s important to be proactive now” and do all necessary replacements.
“AT&T started their nationwide shutdown June 30, and they’re going to turn down their copper network within two years,” notes Sean Sullivan, vice president of product management at New York-based MetTel.
What has to happen is doable, Sullivan says, noting that the work had to be done at scale in other industries that have gone through the transformation. “One of our multi-location clients, the U.S. Postal Service, needed to modernize their postal stations, and we updated 17,000 US postal stations within about 20 months.”
Most importantly, Sullivan emphasizes, “The time to act is now; you want to find a trusted partner that has done this before and can manage all the different communication lines at the same time. Then the partner is going to have to do a complete inventory, start with the most mission-critical and work things through.”
“It’s an imminent problem that’s being accelerated by the FCC and federal preemption of state laws that were slowing this down,” Brik says. “Honestly, the national infrastructure can no longer support these copper lines, and carriers are physically ripping copper lines out and using them for data center purposes.
“So you have that convergence of factors that’s going to cause the rural hospital facilities to be forced to migrate, and they should do it in a planned manner,” Brik adds, emphasizing that, “The FCC’s Rural Healthcare Fund offers some support.” And it’s all the older technology, particularly copper phone-line based fax machines, that is simply going to have to be replaced.
In the end, industry and technology observers note, all of this mandated change will have been for the good: rural copper phone and data lines are extremely slow in their operation, and are subject to cross-talk and signal database loss. Looking forward into the coming months, technology experts say that rural healthcare leaders will be happy they were pushed into this technological transformation.
Mark Hagland is a Fellow of the American College of Health Data Management and a long-time writer and editor covering the health information technology industry.