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For most of the past year, copper retirement has been told as an AT&T story, and increasingly as an AT&T versus California story. That framing is now out of date. As of August 2026, the country’s major incumbent carriers are filing to discontinue legacy copper service across dozens of states at the same time, covering tens of millions of locations. Copper retirement has become an industry-wide movement, and the practical takeaway for enterprises is that no service territory should now be treated as safe.
AT&T: Approved to Retire More Than 30 Percent of Its Copper This Year
AT&T remains the most public and aggressive of the incumbents. On the company’s most recent earnings call, CEO John Stankey said AT&T had FCC approval to discontinue legacy services at more than 30 percent of its roughly 4,600 copper wire centers, with those discontinuances becoming effective in late 2026. The company also has approval to stop selling legacy services to new customers, known as grandfathering, at more than 85 percent of its wire centers, which means the on-ramp to new copper service is already closed across most of its footprint.
Separately, AT&T has asked the FCC for permission not to restore service in more than 600 areas across 16 states after damage from copper theft or equipment failure, arguing it makes no economic sense to rebuild a legacy network it plans to retire within a few years anyway. And the company is still pressing its petition to have the FCC preempt California’s carrier of last resort rules, an effort the state and consumer advocates continue to oppose, which we covered in depth in our analysis of the AT&T versus California fight.
Verizon: Millions of Locations Across More Than a Dozen States
Verizon has moved from a slower posture to filing at significant scale. An August 2026 request sought permission to discontinue copper service across nine states in a portion of its network covering as many as 12 million locations. That came on top of an earlier application covering 4.5 million locations across eight additional states.
Telecom regulators in Nebraska and Minnesota pushed back, asking for more data to verify where Verizon had actually built fiber and where wireless coverage was genuinely available, out of concern that the FCC’s broadband coverage map overstated the alternatives. The application was approved anyway, automatically, after the FCC did not request additional information within the comment window. The objection did not stop it. This is the auto-grant process in action, and it is worth understanding in its own right.
Lumen: Voice Is Not Our Future
Lumen, the incumbent formerly known as CenturyLink, has taken the most strategically blunt position of any carrier. On its second quarter 2026 earnings call, CFO Chris Stansbury told investors Lumen had announced end of sale for voice and would be aggressive about end of life, meeting obligations to large customers and regulators but otherwise treating voice as, in his words, not the company’s future. Lumen’s legacy portfolio fell 15 percent in the quarter while its strategic portfolio grew, and executives described voice revenue as immaterial.
What Lumen conspicuously did not provide was an end-of-life date. That leaves its customers with clear direction and no timeline, which is a uniquely difficult planning environment. The picture is further complicated by Lumen’s 2025 sale of its Quantum Fiber consumer business to AT&T for 5.75 billion dollars, keeping the copper: in parts of Colorado, CenturyLink has told customers it can no longer carry their voice service over the fiber it sold and has filed to discontinue fiber voice, steering customers to wireless replacements. Lumen is also seeking to shed its carrier of last resort obligations in states including Utah and California, the same exit AT&T is pursuing. We break down what this means for Lumen and CenturyLink customers in a dedicated analysis (Channel Dive, August 6, 2026).
Fidium: The Regional Carriers Are Filing Too
Copper retirement is not only a national-carrier story. Fidium, the fiber brand of the company formerly known as Consolidated Communications, submitted applications this month to discontinue legacy service in parts of eight states.
Fidium has been overbuilding its copper footprint with fiber and now reports well over a million fiber passings, and it plans to offer voice over its fiber network in the areas it is decommissioning. The pattern matters because it shows the retirement wave extends to regional and independent carriers, not just the national incumbents. If your locations are served by a smaller ILEC, you are not insulated from this.
The Common Thread: A Process Built to Move Fast
Three different carriers, dozens of states, tens of millions of locations, and one shared enabling condition, an FCC that has deliberately smoothed the path. Under Chairman Brendan Carr, the Commission streamlined copper retirement in its March 5, 2026 order, waived certain filing requirements, and made it easier for carriers to show that mobile wireless service qualifies as an adequate replacement. The FCC’s own tech transition consumer guide frames this as network modernization and lays out the notification customers are entitled to.
Applications now move in large batches toward automatic approval unless the Commission affirmatively intervenes, which it has generally declined to do even when states object.
What This Means If You Still Run POTS Lines
The strategic shift is simple to state. A year ago, an enterprise could plausibly argue that its particular carrier or state was moving slowly and that copper would be available in its footprint for years. That argument no longer holds in most of the country. AT&T, Verizon, and Fidium are all filing at once, the filings cover most of their footprints, and the approval process favors speed.
For a multi-site operator, this means three things.
No footprint is automatically safe. If your locations span multiple carriers and states, they are increasingly all in the same pipeline. Planning around one carrier’s timeline while assuming another’s territory is protected is no longer realistic.
The subscriber counts reveal the strategy. Across these filings, the number of actual copper subscribers is a tiny fraction of the locations covered, often a few percent. Carriers are retiring entire swaths of network to shed the small number of remaining copper lines. If you are one of those few remaining lines, you are precisely who this wave is aimed at, and the economics give the carrier every reason to move on quickly.
Life safety and critical circuits need to move first. Fire alarm communicators, elevator phones, emergency call boxes, and SCADA and telemetry circuits carry compliance requirements and validation steps that make rushed cutovers risky. In an environment where approvals can arrive quietly and disconnection windows are short, these systems should be at the front of your migration plan, not the back.
The Bottom Line
Copper retirement has crossed a threshold. It is no longer a single carrier’s initiative or a single state’s fight. It is a coordinated industry-wide exit from legacy copper, enabled by an FCC that has chosen to make that exit as frictionless as possible. Enterprises that still depend on copper lines, in any carrier’s territory and any state, should assume the clock is already running and plan their migration while they still control the timing rather than reacting to a notice when it arrives.
MarketSpark helps enterprises get ahead of that timeline with managed POTS replacement, from site survey through installation, monitoring, and lifecycle management across every location you operate. If your organization still has copper dependent lines anywhere in your footprint, request a free assessment and we will show you exactly where you stand.