Is this the start of the great telephony migration?
If the name of a technology has the word ‘old’ in it, well, you can safely bet that it’s not being used to break down barriers to progress. And yet, according to the FCC, there are still 41 million POTS lines in the US.
POTS? It stands for “plain old telephone service”, the copper wires your grandparents’ telephone was connected to. What’s wrong with POTS? For starters, a copper POTs line has a maximum bandwidth of about 10Gbps. A fiber optic line, by comparison, has a bandwidth?of around 60Tbps, or 60,000Gbps. ?
Nor is bandwidth the only reason why it’s time for companies to call time on copper lines and migrate to modern communications
Reasons to migrate from POTS
1.?????In 2017, the FCC said that telephone companies can discontinue their POTS services after 2022. If you’re still on POTS, your service could be discontinued at any time [1].
2.?????POTS, with its limited bandwidth, is a bottleneck on your company’s growth. And adding more bandwidth, means expensive additional lines.
3.?????POTS systems are expensive to maintain. If anything goes wrong, your provider will need to hunt down the fault on multiple copper lines.
4.?????It’s not scalable. If you’ve reached the limit of your available bandwidth, you need to add more lines. And in 2023, no one wants to dig up the sidewalk to bury more copper.
If POTS is yesterday’s technology, what should businesses replace it with? With cloud-based voice technologies
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With the right cloud-based voice system, not only do you get guaranteed bandwidth, uptime and quality of service (QoS). The transport backbone that carries your voice communications will also carry data as well.
At one stroke, you get not just flexible, scalable and high-quality voice communications
With the right provider and the right approach, a modern, cloud-based voice system will integrate your unified communications as a service (UCaaS)
And you can add advanced functions, such as location- and device-agnostic simultaneous ringing, call forwarding and hunt groups to your telephony system. These make users more productive and provide customers with a far better experience.
AT&T provides customers across the world with market-leading cloud-voice and related services. Talk to our experts today about AT&T Cloud Voice and find out how it can help you replace your POTS installation with new, flexible, scalable communications technology that will help you grow your company and meet your business goals.
[FOOTNOTES]
Experienced Entrepreneurial Manager and Sales Leader | Driving Results Globally
1 年Great article. I do however remember way back when ISDN came out. It was sometimes called "I Still Don't Need It". The internet speeds that copper can provide on the last mile are still good enough for a lot of consumers and even small/medium sized businesses. There are costs associated with laying fibre optic cable to remote locations. Is a customer willing to pay the actual costs for getting connected to the faster internet? How much is the consumer willing to pay? €/$ 2,000 ? €/$ 10-20 additionally per month? There is often not a business case unless somehow subsidized. Regarding voice, I totally agree. Even with copper based last mile VDSL internet connection, voice applications should move towards"....?a modern, cloud-based voice system ... unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platform...."
VP Customer Success at Tuki.io
1 年IP telephony has been around for more than 20 years , 41M POTS lines in the US is a reminder that technology revolutions often take longer than anticipated - it is definitely the right time to move to IP telephony in the cloud.