Leased Line Data Circuits - Time to Sunset this technology

With every great technology there comes a time where that technology has seen it’s best days and I believe we have reached that precipice with the Point to Point four wire leased line data circuit. For the last 75 years the phone companies dotted the landscape with telephony infrastructure including local exchanges and switching technology. No place seemed too remote for them to get to as businesses and consumers were happy to pay for the convenience of a four wire telephone circuit in our homes, companies, and even for use in remote monitoring solutions like SCADA and telemetry. With the re-occurring revenue model firmly in place, the phone company was pleased to work with utilities, oil companies, gas companies and other organizations to provide these data circuits and equipment knowing that they would be in place long term and you the customer would be paying on them for years to come.

This technology was a staple for many municipalities and industries and carried many benefits. It was a difficult technology to hack as you would need physical access to the circuit and even then someone would have had to know what data was being sent on the line and how (what data protocol) it was being used. There was also the 24/7/365 reliability of the phone carrier with staff in every part of the country trained to work on this type of technology (with the occasional outage due to lightning or weather). Lastly, it was convenient as each business could bundle it in with the voice service that they were already using. This made billing easy and simple for the users.

Now, Industry and business has come to the point where these point to point circuits are still being used in many applications across the country but to what benefit? It was a great way to transmit data for many years but there are many challenges today. With IIoT and IoT applications on the rise many of these point to point circuits are ill equipped to increase data payloads or increase speeds that are easily attainable with other technologies. There are also some other factors that are presenting current users of this technology with new challenges. The first is the fact that the support base for tuning analog data circuits are aging and leaving the work force, headed to retirement. The technicians that were expert at data loop tuning and had the experience with the sometimes fussy equipment are difficult to find. This presents challenges with response times for carriers still supporting these technologies as well as increased outage times when those lightning strikes or other events do occur. Lastly, it has become expensive when compared to other technologies in real dollars. With the increase in cellular tower propagation (spurred by competition) and additional technologies like Fiber, Spread Spectrum, and typical 6 wire Ethernet it is easy to see why prices compared to these other technologies are higher.

There are strengths and weaknesses to each of replacement technologies mentioned above, but it is clear that with the increasing costs of keeping the point to pint circuits in place, and the decreasing pool of talented analog data circuit technicians, it is time to make a move to a newer technology. It will make any project where SCADA or telemetry data that is being added into an IoT or IIoT project become much smoother. Your organization will very likely save money as well as frustration in trying to support a technology that has seen it’s best days behind it..

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