Verizon just moved to cut landline phone service in 9 states within weeks

Verizon’s request to stop offering copper landline service in Arizona, Delaware, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia is set to be automatically approved by the Federal Communications Commission on September 26 unless regulators intervene. The filing covers about 277,000 home and business lines, and service could begin shutting off as soon as October 23.

Customers who lose copper service will not simply go dark. Verizon’s replacement equipment runs on AA batteries rated for roughly 23 to 24 hours of standby power, a fraction of the multi-day outages that follow major storms in several of the nine states involved.

Nine states now, nine more plus Washington on deck

The nine-state filing, first detailed in a report from Phandroid, is not Verizon’s only pending request. A second, separate filing, reported by DataRemote’s newsroom coverage, seeks to discontinue copper voice service across nine additional states plus Washington, D.C. — California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia — covering roughly 750,000 more locations. Combined, the two filings put 18 states and the nation’s capital on a path off copper, a scope confirmed independently by trade coverage citing the underlying FCC dockets, WC Docket No. 26-227 and No. 26-252.

Both filings run through the same regulatory shortcut: Section 214 of the Communications Act, applied under 47 C.F.R. § 63.71, lets a carrier discontinue a legacy service through a streamlined public-notice process rather than a full hearing, and an application under that rule is deemed granted a set number of days after the public notice unless the FCC steps in to block or condition it. That is the mechanism behind the September 26 deadline in the nine-state filing at issue here, and it is the same process the second, larger filing is moving through behind it.

The battery math behind Verizon’s replacement box

Copper phone lines have one property fiber and wireless alternatives do not automatically share: the phone company’s own equipment powers them, so a landline kept working through a blackout as long as the line itself survived. Verizon’s replacement units break that link, running instead on their own battery packs that the company rates at roughly 23 to 24 hours before needing a recharge or fresh AA cells.

Twenty-three hours covers a typical overnight outage. It does not cover the multi-day restoration windows that followed recent hurricanes and ice storms in several of the nine states in this filing, a gap that has become the central argument in nearly every objection filed against Verizon’s copper-retirement requests around the country. Reporting on a separate, unrelated set of copper filings in New York’s North Country, WWNY-TV quoted a Verizon spokesperson’s standard response to that concern directly: “if there is no viable alternative for a customer, their copper landline service will not be disconnected.”

A docket number, a battery limit, and one town’s objection

Opposition to Verizon’s broader copper retirement push has been organized and specific rather than diffuse. The Association of BellTel Retirees, which represents roughly 134,000 current and former Verizon employees, filed comments calling the move, in the words of its chair, Thomas Steed, “a cloaked attempt for the company to walk away from and eliminate the jobs of tens-of-thousands of union technicians.” Steed’s sharper line landed on the safety question directly: pulling copper without adequate battery backup, he said, is “like building a passenger ship with no lifeboats.”

In Massachusetts — one of the nine additional states named in Verizon’s second, larger filing rather than the nine at issue in the September 26 deadline — the town of Hawley’s Selectboard voted unanimously to ask the FCC to reject Verizon’s proposal outright, citing eight-hour battery backups it called insufficient for the multi-day outages common to the region. Eighty-year-old resident Jody Stewart told the Greenfield Recorder that “a landline is a lifeline for a lot of people,” a sentiment the Selectboard’s vote effectively made official town policy.

Verizon’s own numbers, cited across multiple filings, show why the company frames this as modernization rather than abandonment: nationwide landline subscriptions fell 81% between 2014 and 2024, and in the nine states covered by the filing due for approval on September 26, fewer than 2.25% of eligible customers still keep copper service at all. That decline is real, but it does not erase the fact that the customers still on copper in rural stretches of Arizona, New Mexico and Virginia are disproportionately the ones with no reliable cell signal to fall back on, which is exactly the population every objection filed so far has centered on.

Nothing in the record so far suggests the FCC intends to block the September 26 filing before its deadline arrives. Barring an intervention, the approval becomes automatic under the same streamlined rule that has cleared similar Verizon requests in other states over the past two years, leaving the fight over battery life and rural coverage to play out around the larger, still-pending second filing instead.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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