Businesses continue to demand fast, agile communication tools to prepare their workforces for the age of hybrid work.
Communication service providers (CSPs) must keep their networks in a position to deliver what their customers want or risk losing them to more nimble, innovative competitors.
This will inevitably mean moving away from networks that have served them well in the past but will ultimately prove unfit to innovate, compete, and win.
A big part of this will be dwindling support for older hardware. The likes of Genband, BroadSoft, and Metaswitch have all been snapped up by technology giants that compete with service providers and have different agendas.
This means that replacement parts will soon become hard to come by, if they aren’t already, driving up the price of maintaining legacy networks even further.
Service providers that rely heavily on Metaswitch VP3510 or VP2510, for example, can still readily access replacement gear now, but the end-of-life date of 30 November 2023 is on the horizon.
Many service providers are still unsure about moving to the cloud even with this in mind.
Josh Moormann, Director of Customer Success at Alianza, said some have the misconception that moving to a cloud-based network will cost more than the continued maintenance of old infrastructure.
The fear of unknown costs comes hand-in-hand with abandoning revenue that service providers know and understand.
“Some providers are reluctant to step away from known revenue,” Moormann said.
“But, when they do the analysis to account for the direct and indirect costs and risks of running a legacy voice network, they realise it’s just a matter of when, not if, they move to the cloud.
“Using large, rural providers with 300,000+ internet and phone subscribers as an example — they may be receiving $5M+ per year from usage fees and intercarrier compensation (ICC) for calls into their local network.
“Over a five-year period that means $25M in revenue, so naturally a CSP in this situation would be reluctant to step away from it — at first glance. No matter what, when service providers start to optimize their network and eliminate rooms full of aging equipment, portions of their traditional ICC revenue will start to go away. However, so will the substantial costs to maintain those systems, resulting in a more profitable and sustainable business model.”
