Customers, partners and resellers be aware. Thirty million business phone lines and tens of thousands of TDM-based internet and private line data circuits will be retired, disconnected or migrated to other services, some with less than 90 days’ notice. All TDM services will likely be migrated within the next 24-36 months. During the last few years, local exchange carriers (LECs) and facilities-based competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) have been retiring older network infrastructure, specifically analog plain old telephone service (POTS) lines and time division multiplex (TDM) Internet, private data service and PRIs delivered on T1 lines. These services were the bread and butter of our industry from the early 1990s until the early teens of this century. From a LEC carrier ’s perspective, competition from cable broadband for business, high demand for dedicated internet access (DIA) and POTS delivered on fiber and broadband, as well as destabilizing LEC and CLEC bankruptcies, mergers and acquisitions, have led to tremendous changes within their network infrastructures. Consider what’s happened with local access and network switching. The insatiable demand for bandwidth and the limitations and high cost of maintaining copper infrastructure have driven the evolution in access to fiber, broadband and fixed wireless. The old circuit switch voice and TDM data world is now totally IP centric. Just contrast the amount of bandwidth now available and at what price point compared to 2018! TDM technology has been around since LBJ was President. You cannot expect to get high bandwidth and low prices from an era when 600 bps was considered high speed. It makes no economic sense to try and maintain the old with the new. But some applications are hard to migrate, and customers can be too busy or reluctant to change. Decommissioning obsolete networks is a must for carriers to remain competitive. They must complete the conversion to IP and newer methods of local transport. But there is a right way and a wrong way to make these changes. The right way gives stakeholders including CORE COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK SERVICES RETIREMENT AND FORCED MIGRATION ONE BIG PAIN IN THE … By Glen Nelson 80 CHANNELV ISION | MARCH - APRIL 2023
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