Most Ohio businesses haven't had a real look at their telecom stack in years. Here's what actually shows up when somebody walks the building, pulls the invoices, and tells the truth.
By Jonathan Eubanks · May 29, 2026 · 8 min read
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By Jonathan Eubanks, Buckeye Telecom · May 29, 2026 · 8 min read
A property manager in Dublin called us in March. Eleven buildings, mostly small medical and professional tenants. His cyber insurance renewal had come back with seventeen questions he had no way to answer, and three of the buildings had just gotten an AT&T copper notice he wasn’t sure how to read. Could we take a quick look?
Two weeks later we handed him an inventory and a stack of findings. Thirty-one analog POTS lines running fire alarms, elevators, and gate phones — none of which would survive the wire-center cut he’d been notified about. Five sites running Wi-Fi on Cisco Meraki access points that stop getting security patches in June. Three internet circuits sitting on month-to-month expired-promo pricing, costing him about $1,800 a month more than the same carrier was quoting new customers down the street. Two of his “backup” circuits riding the same fiber as the primaries.
None of it was hidden. All of it had been sitting in invoices, portals, and ceiling tiles for years. Nobody had been paid to walk the building and look. The carrier wasn’t going to. The MSP wasn’t paid for it. The cyber insurance broker definitely wasn’t. So none of it got found until somebody finally asked.
That’s what a real telecom audit is — the boring walk through every circuit, contract, and ceiling-mounted box that nobody on the carrier side is paid to do. Here’s what shows up almost every time.
Every audit starts the same way: pull every invoice from every carrier for the last twelve months and reconcile them against what is actually plugged into the building. The gap is almost always larger than anyone expects.
A POTS line installed for a credit-card terminal that got replaced by an iPad in 2019, still billing $48 a month. A T1 decommissioned during a remodel, but the carrier never closed the account, still billing $410. A “backup” DSL the carrier turned down for non-payment in 2022 and nobody noticed because the office manager was on auto-draft. Three cellular hotspots in a desk drawer because somebody from sales ordered one each year.
I have never audited a multi-location business that didn’t have at least one circuit that hadn’t carried useful traffic in a year. Average is four to seven dead lines per business. Largest single find: a $2,100-a-month MPLS tail replaced by SD-WAN three years earlier and never disconnected.
Quick win: Pull last month’s telecom invoices and circle every line item. For each one, write down what device or service it serves. The ones you can’t answer are your audit findings.
The light on the ceiling still blinks. The Wi-Fi still works. The dashboard still says green. Almost every multi-location business I audit is running at least one piece of network hardware that has reached or is about to reach end-of-support — meaning no more security patches, no more firmware updates, no more warranty. The Cisco Meraki MR33 sunsets next month. The MX84 firewall goes off support in October.
The finding is rarely “you have one bad access point.” It’s “you have 340 access points across twelve sites, eighty go off support this year, procurement is six to twelve months because every multi-location business is refreshing the same models at once, and your cyber insurance renewal in November is going to ask about it.” Knowing that in March is a planning problem. Finding out in October is a fire.
Every commercial building I walk has more copper in it than the owner thinks. The fire alarm panel is on a POTS line. The elevator emergency phone is on a POTS line. The alarm dialer at the back door is on a POTS line. The fax the property manager swears nobody uses is still picking up because the realtor on the third floor sends a signed disclosure from it once a month.
That was fine until AT&T started decommissioning copper wire centers across Ohio this summer. The FCC voted in March to take away the rules that used to slow this down. What’s left is a 90-day notice and a hard turn-down date. The day the wire center goes dark, every analog line it served stops working — and the fire alarm contractor needs ninety days’ lead time to put a cellular replacement on the panel that the AHJ and your insurance carrier will both sign off on.
A free Buckeye stack audit walks every site, reconciles every invoice, maps every model number, and tells you in plain English what’s alive, what’s dead, what’s about to be sunsetted, and what you’re paying for that you shouldn’t be. We don’t resell a single carrier’s product line, so the answer is shaped by what’s true, not by what’s on quota.
Every audit pulls the original contract for every active circuit. The surprises land in three categories. Promo pricing that expired and nobody calendared, so the bill stepped up eighteen percent and has been at the new rate for fourteen months. Auto-renewal language buried on page nine, where the notice window came and went and the contract is now locked through next year with an early-termination fee equal to the remaining term. And the contract nobody can find — the sales rep is gone, the signer is gone, the carrier’s account team has turned over twice, and the only proof of terms is a line item with a service code nobody can decode.
The audit’s job is to find those contracts before the renewal window closes, not after. Half the time, the executed agreement the carrier sends back on request says something different than what the customer remembers.
A modern multi-location business runs on twenty to fifty SaaS platforms — payroll, scheduling, time clocks, point of sale, CRM, document storage, dispatch. Each one is holding customer data, employee data, or financial data. Almost none of them have been audited by the business that depends on them.
A SaaS audit isn’t as glamorous as buying a firewall, but it’s the work that turned a $0 finding into a real problem for Columbus City Schools earlier this month. The breach didn’t happen at Columbus — it happened at Instructure, the company behind Canvas. The contract said SOC 2. The marketing page said encryption at rest. And one Tuesday a criminal group walked in through a misconfigured admin panel, and the security guarantee on which the whole stack rested turned out to have been a PDF.
A real audit treats the SaaS layer as part of the network. List every vendor holding your data. Confirm MFA on every admin login. Segment the network so a compromised SaaS account can’t reach internal systems. Make sure somebody on your side knows which vendor exposes which data, so when the breach disclosure lands — and it will land — you already know which sites are exposed and what has to be cut off in the first ten minutes.
Quick win: Open your password manager or SSO dashboard and count the SaaS apps your business is logged into. If that number is bigger than the number you can list off the top of your head, you have an inventory problem worth fixing this quarter.
A real telecom audit isn’t a sales call with a clipboard. It’s the boring walk through every invoice, every contract, every model number on every ceiling, and every SaaS login — with somebody on your side who isn’t paid by a carrier to look the other way. It surfaces dead circuits, expired pricing, hardware aging into uninsurability, copper lines holding up the fire panel, and SaaS vendors quietly sitting on data the carrier never sees.
None of it is hidden. The reason it doesn’t get found is that nobody on the carrier side is paid to find it, and nobody internally has the bandwidth to walk every site for a day with a notepad and a flashlight. The audit is that walk. The deliverable is a plain-English list of what to do about each finding, in the order they will hurt you.
If you can’t remember the last time anyone actually looked at your stack — not the bill, the stack — that’s your answer. Call +1 (614) 224-2003. Two of our engineers will walk your sites, pull your invoices, map your models, check your contracts, and hand you a plain-English picture of what you have. Free. No obligation. We’re not on a single carrier’s quota.
— Jonathan
Looking for help with this? See our page on Columbus business internet procurement.
Jonathan founded Buckeye Telecom in 2003 after years in the Columbus telecom industry — first at 5-Star distributors learning the carrier side, then carrying his own quota in telecom sales. He still works directly with clients — backed by the Buckeye team.
Talk to the Buckeye team — the owner is involved in every engagement, and there’s no advisory fee.
Prefer to talk now? Call or text 614-224-2003.