TELUS Tested Five Vendors Before Choosing How to Replace Its Business Copper Lines

A telephone company retiring its copper network has a problem most of its customers never see. The ordinary lines are straightforward to move onto fibre. The difficult ones are the lines nobody dials: the emergency phone in an elevator, the communicator wired into a fire alarm panel, the call box at a loading door. Those connections carry obligations under Canadian safety codes, and a carrier cannot simply switch them off and leave the building owner to work it out. It has to offer a replacement that holds up to inspection.

TELUS has now chosen one. Speaking at Ooma’s investor day on 29 September 2026, Chris Burgy, the company’s senior vice president of corporate development, said TELUS had selected Ooma AirDial for business copper line replacement in Canada after evaluating competing products, and that a contract had been executed with launch planning under way. Eric Stang, Ooma’s chief executive officer, described TELUS as the strongest kind of customer for the product because the carrier owns the lines being replaced. The starting point is TELUS Business Solutions, which Ooma put at up to 300,000 lines, with other divisions of the carrier holding further copper lines that remain under discussion.

Canadian readers should be clear about what Ooma is before drawing conclusions from this. Ooma, Inc. is a United States company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker OOMA. It is neither Canadian owned nor a small or medium sized enterprise. Its Canadian footprint is nonetheless established: the company states it has provided cloud based telecommunications services in Canada since 2005, maintains an office in Vancouver covering engineering, product development, support and research, and brought AirDial to the Canadian market in May 2024.

The product itself is built around a specific engineering choice. A unit mounts to a wall and converts an analogue telephone connection into a digital one, so the equipment already wired to the line keeps working without being replaced. Traffic runs over wired Ethernet and wireless LTE at the same time rather than failing over from one to the other, an approach Ooma calls MultiPath, and the company states that traffic stays on its own network rather than crossing the public internet. A remote management portal lets an administrator see the status of units across multiple buildings, which matters when the alternative is sending someone to stand in an elevator and press a button.

The detail from the evaluation that deserves attention has nothing to do with specifications. Burgy said the process ran about six months, that TELUS tested the top five vendors in the category, and that the testing included a fire panel specific to the Canadian market. Ooma adapted its device firmware to work with that panel within a couple of days. A Canadian fire panel is not an exotic request, but it is the kind of requirement a product designed for the United States market can fail without anyone having anticipated it, and the speed of the response is the part a smaller company can learn from.

That is the first lesson here for Canadian small and medium sized businesses, and it does not require a telecommunications contract to apply. In a competitive evaluation, the moment a prospect surfaces a requirement nobody planned for is the moment the decision is usually made. Most suppliers treat it as a problem to be scoped, costed and scheduled. Turning it around in days, on a test the buyer set rather than one the vendor chose, demonstrates something about how the business operates that no reference call conveys. Smaller firms are often better placed to do this than large ones and rarely treat it as the advantage it is.

The second lesson sits in the timeline. Burgy indicated that a full conversion would likely take TELUS three to five years, carried out in stages by the carrier’s own technicians, because critical life safety devices cannot be cut off abruptly. For Canadian business owners this is useful context rather than cause for delay. Copper is not disappearing in a single week, and there is room to plan. The constraint is that the work on a given building involves an elevator contractor, a monitoring company and often an inspection, so the sequence takes longer than the notice period suggests.

Independent recognition exists alongside the carrier selection. In May 2026, Frost and Sullivan named AirDial the Competitive Strategy Leader for best practices in the North American copper replacement industry, the second consecutive year the product received that recognition. The analysis credited the combination of hardware, connectivity, voice service and central cloud management in a single offering, and the simultaneous use of two network paths rather than conventional failover.

For any Canadian business still running analogue equipment, the practical step is the same regardless of which supplier eventually does the work. Pull the carrier invoices, list every line the business pays for, then walk the building to establish what each one actually connects to, because the billing record and the equipment on site often disagree. Identify the life safety connections first and confirm with the monitoring company and the elevator service provider that signals arrive correctly after any change, keeping the original line active until that confirmation comes back.

The TELUS decision is worth noting less for the product chosen than for what the evaluation reveals about the problem. A carrier with its own engineering resources spent six months testing five vendors before committing, and built a Canadian specific device into the test. Businesses treating their own copper transition as a routine telephone order may be underestimating it by a considerable margin.

Website : https://www.ooma.com/

Your role in staying up to date is integral to our shared mission of fostering a community of innovators. CanadianSME Magazine is a valuable treasure trove of entrepreneurial knowledge. Click here to subscribe to our monthly editions for updates on Canadian businesses. Follow our handle @canadian_sme on X to remain updated on all business trends and developments. Your support is crucial to our mission.

Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available information intended only for informational purposes. CanadianSME Small Business Magazine does not endorse or guarantee any products or services mentioned. Readers are advised to conduct their research and due diligence before making business decisions.