POTS continues to decline as wireless in all forms is on the rise and is now used in four out of five new installations.
For the last eight years The Monitoring Association’s Alarm Industry Communications Committee (AICC) has been running an annual communications survey. Its object is to find the percentage of installations using a form of PSTN or VoIP, wireless or IP to send signals from a monitored premise to a central station. For the sake of simplicity, the survey does not differentiate between a technology being used by itself or in conjunction with another. This is why adding the results of two or more technologies will yield sums greater than 100 percent. The survey participants are solely alarm installation companies. The resulting data is used as we advocate for the alarm industry at the FCC and Congress.
The Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is an analog voice transmission phone system implemented over copper twisted pair wires. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is the use of a broadband path instead of a pair of directly connected copper wires. As both these methods use what we have traditionally called the “digital dialer” they are lumped together in this survey as Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). There are fewer and fewer copper pairs in America, so a good deal of that voice traffic is now carried over cable or IP circuits, assuming the encoding/decoding process of these signals over cable or IP circuits does not distort the data being transmitted. In the survey’s second year, it was modified to add installations made in the previous twelve months. So this gives us a picture of what is in place (i.e. legacy) versus the trend of new installations going forward.