CONNECTIVITY
ISDN: All op portunity
without the rush?
Paul Taylor, Sales and
Marketing Director for
communications services
company Voice ex, a
company that has not only been
a supplier of SIP trunks for 13
years but also has their own
hosted PBX service, Nebula, says
his market is very buoyant.
“Users are not necessarily in a
hurry to get rid of their ISDN so
our market is driven by a number
of factors.
It’s a case of users moving to
SIP rather than their existing
SIP trunks over to us. Of course
there is the ISDN e ect where we
are converting a lot of ISDN to
SIP and the drivers here are rms
that are moving premises, having
new connectivity installed and
both users and resellers placing
PBX functionality in to a data
centre where that service does not
have multi-tenancy functionality.
Nagging away at the back of the connectivity and IP Telephony markets is the
approaching date for the cessation of support for the ISDN. As 2025 gets another year
closer we speak to channel players about the impact this event horizon is having
SIP is an ideal solution here for
creating instances.
We have done a lot of research
on take up and usage of SIP
and found that in hosted PBX
use cases there is one SIP trunk
installed for every six users.”
According to Justin Blaine
NTA this topic seems to present
a rm divide for the resellers he
meets as to whether they believe
the ISDN network will be turned
o at the end of 2025.
“My take on this is that our
industry has been trying to
create churn for years, we now
have a valid reason to be talking
to our customers about this
announcement from BT and
therefore we should be ‘making
hay whilst the sun shines’. We
have a deadline to work to and
we should be out in the market
telling those end customers they
have no choice, it’s simply SIP or
Hosted Telephony, we have an
amazing selling opportunity and
this will probably be the best one
our channel will ever see!”
“ e big ISDN switch o
is comparable to the transition
from analogue terrestrial TV in
the UK,” says Justin Hamilton
Martin, Regional Associate
Director, Centile Telecom
Applications.
“While it can be tempting
to leave it to the last minute,
companies who do could be
running a risk: there may
be provisioning bottlenecks,
customers will be rushed to make
a quick decision.
e longer business users leave
it, the longer they are dependent
on old technology, which
operators have made it clear they
will not continue to support.
ere is a huge opportunity
for the comms channel to open
up new business opportunities
through the ISDN switcho
. After all, those customers
are going to have to buy from
somewhere: channel rms who
act quickly, help educate business
users about the bene ts of xed
mobile convergence and uni ed
comms will be the winners.”
Enzo Viscito, Managing
Director at Inclarity, is relaxed
about the ISDN deadline
approaching when he says, “ is
is just something that will run
its course. Every month it seems
that bre connectivity is getting
cheaper and the government
voucher incentive schemes are
encouraging resellers to swap
out ISDN trunks to a suitable
connection that will support IP
based communications.”
Reseller Comment
“Users that have for example, an
AVAYA IP O ce or similar, that
they bought two years ago are
not going to panic about ISDN
being switched o , they’ll just get
SIP,” says Nathan Hill-Haines
Managing Director of reseller
Amvia.
“Customers that have an
ISDN based system that is
working perfectly on an ISDN
connection shouldn’t worry about
the switch o either, it’s a long
while away.
e catalyst for change, in
my view, is that there are a lot
of businesses that have a phone
system that needs replacing. So
the switch-o hasn’t suddenly
changed much at all in our view.”
Paul Taylor of Voicefl ex
34 | IP Telephony 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
/www.commsbusiness.co.uk