POTS Replacement in Sandy Springs Class-A Office Towers
Sandy Springs hosts some of the most densely occupied corporate office space in Metro Atlanta, concentrated along the GA-400 corridor between Abernathy Road and Hammond Drive and in the Glenridge Connector area. These class-A towers, most built during the 1990s, carry the copper-circuit infrastructure that was standard at the time: dedicated POTS lines for elevator monitoring, fire panel supervisory reporting, elevator cabin phones, and in some buildings the dial-tone path for legacy access-control panels. That infrastructure was built into the base-building specifications, and the tenant improvements layered on top of it over 25 years assumed it would remain in place.
The copper-retirement reality in Sandy Springs is that AT&T and other carriers are removing the last-mile copper in the GA-400 corridor systematically. A building that has never had a technology problem in its history may receive a copper-retirement notice that requires action within 60 days. The fire alarm system and the elevator monitoring system both have specific regulatory requirements in Georgia: the fire panel must maintain a supervised communications path to a licensed central station, and the elevator must have a working means of two-way communication from the cab at all times under the ASME A17.1 safety code adopted by Georgia. Neither requirement waits for a convenient schedule.
We have completed POTS replacement projects at buildings in the Glenridge corridor that involve both fire panel communicator upgrades and elevator cabin phone replacements in a single mobilization. Combining the two scopes reduces disruption to tenants and lowers the total cost compared to two separate service calls. For a Sandy Springs office tower, a building-wide copper-circuit audit is the starting point. We provide that assessment free of charge.
