PSTN is Passe, IP is Making Big Moves

In that stereotypical, valley-girl tone, “PSTN is so last year.” While many critical technology figures as well as buyers, sellers and resellers and manufacturers are gathered this week in Miami, Fla. for ITEXPO (News - Alert) Miami 2013, there’s a staggering amount of research and key findings to prove that PSTN is moving on down to Florida for a different reason – to cozy up in the stereotypical state to begin enjoying its retirement. Perhaps it will start sporting pastel colored khakis and join a new country club, too.

Search Unified Communications (News - Alert) conveniently brought a ton of this research together in one report, where it explains that “as the number of enterprises who rely on mobile and IP phone services for communications rises, it’s only a matter of time before the business market severs its legacy public switched telephone network connections,” as divulged by Senior Research Analyst at Nemertes Research Group Inc., Karen Kervin.

The report also hints at a very solid prediction – could it one day be that businesses may not have a choice? In other words, equivalent to how the mass consuming public is seeing smartphones progressively replacing standard cell phones, could it be that soon, VoIP will replace PSTN altogether for businesses?

The report mentions that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC (News - Alert)) recently reported that between 2008 and 2011, VoIP subscriptions experienced a CAGR of 19 percent. Conversely, switched access lines decreased nearly nine percent per year. Typically, this is how it goes; one technology progressively shimmies out of the spotlight until eventually, a completely new one is has replaced it – and it doesn’t matter what businesses want or think.

“With demand from both businesses and consumers in decline, service providers are transitioning away from their legacy plain old telephone system (POTS) infrastructure towards VoIP alternatives, and enterprises have to prepare for a change,” the report continues.

Perhaps the most telling sign of this transition is AT&T (News - Alert), one of the heaviest hitters in the space, who reportedly sent a request to the FCC to help assist them in successfully and completely transitioning away from the legacy POTS infrastructure by 2018. AT&T’s Senior VP for Federal Regulatory and Chief Privacy Officer, Bob Quinn, further cemented the company’s positioning by blogging, “The use of the POTS infrastructure [has] plummeted in the last decade … as [customers] switch to VoIP alternatives, wireless services and other forms of digital communications… We requested that the FCC oversee … this IP transition to capture and address the operational, technical and policy issues that necessarily will arise as we go through the process of retiring and transitioning away from TDM technology and services."

Jim Murphy, president and co-founder of California-based VoIP provider Phone (News - Alert) Power, further commented, “"[Business customers] are realizing that VoIP is not a different technology, it's just the evolution of the telephone…If companies want to achieve certain business goals, they have to move to VoIP because their traditional phone service is not going to be able to provide new functionality – like mobility."

So while businesses continue to move to and adopt VoIP as well as its associated technologies including session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking and hosted voice options, it seems PSTN is packing its suitcase even faster to fly down south.

To learn about some excellent SIP telephone options, click here.

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