POTS Replacement in the Perimeter Office Parks
Dunwoody is the center of the Perimeter submarket, and the office towers along Hammond Drive, Ashford Dunwoody Road, and Mount Vernon Road were built between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s. These class-A and class-B buildings were designed with dedicated copper infrastructure for fire panels, elevator monitoring, and access-control dialers. That infrastructure served the buildings well for 20 to 30 years. What the original designers did not plan for was a carrier decision to retire the copper network that fed it.
AT&T has been actively retiring copper circuits in the Perimeter submarket as part of its national copper-to-IP transition. Buildings in Dunwoody's office-park corridors have received copper-retirement notices in waves since 2022, with varying lead times. Some notices have given building operators 90 days. Others have given 30. A class-A office tower with six elevators and a multi-zone fire panel can have a dozen or more POTS circuits to replace, each tied to a different compliance requirement and a different contractor. Replacing them one at a time as each one fails is more expensive than doing a coordinated assessment and replacement project.
For a Perimeter-submarket building in Dunwoody, the right replacement approach is usually a building-wide POTS audit: identify every copper circuit by function, determine the replacement path for each (IP communicator, cellular, or analog telephone adapter depending on the device), and complete all replacements in a single coordinated project. That approach is faster, cleaner, and cheaper than the reactive route. We have completed coordinated POTS replacement projects at multi-floor office buildings in the Perimeter Center East and Perimeter Center West developments. A site audit is the first step and costs nothing.
