And all of a sudden, we had Blackberry dominating the Global market. Watch the 2023 documentary of the Rise and Fall of one of the most secure email systems in the world, which is no longer with us in the handset market ...
Firstly, we are at the present date of March 2024, and you now only have one year to decide how you are going to replace your old 3Com, Avaya, Ericsson, LG / LG-Ericsson. Mitel, NEC, Phillips, Samsung or Toshiba phone systems that work on ISDN2e / ISDN30e.
This is because in December 2025, Openreach is decommissioning all equipment in BT Exchanges that generate a dial tone, known as the PSTN and ISDN networks. They cannot discontinue/decommission the physical copper cable in the ground as we still have SoGEA (fibre-copper hybrid-based broadband that does NOT require a dial tone). BTS (UK) have been supplying this version of FTTC since 2019.
So, as we venture even further into the murk of the virtual world, we need to ensure our voice is clear and on par with the current copper-based public voice networks. How do we achieve this I hear you ask?
The first and most essential step is to ensure you have 'business grade' broadband. I won't bore you to death in this blog post about the technicalities and complexities of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and that not all broadband is the same quality. Just make sure you have a solid, business-grade ISP with a static IP (I will cover this in a future blog post).
Secondly, modify some of your email systems and use advanced off-site filtering to limit the volume of false emails you get (again, I will cover this in a future blog post). You may be thinking right now, what on earth is Pritesh talking about? In layman's terms, it's to ensure your connection is the best possible quality, stays 'clean', and that your bandwidth usage is never compromised.
Thirdly, a decent firewall both on-site and at the hosted telephony provider's end. And there is the defining words: "the hosted telephony provider". The questions to ask are:
- Where are the servers that house that telephony software?
- How many fully qualified and trained engineers are there in the UK for the VoIP system you are thinking of purchasing in place of your solid ISDN-backed Mitel, Avaya, (Siemens) HiPath, Nortel, ShoreTel, Toshiba, Philips, Panasonic or Samsung systems?
- What resilience does the Hosted Telephony provider offer in terms of multi-point routing and do they have their own diversly routed internet connections to ensure your call is always 'on', even if one of their connections drop?
That's it for this blog post! There will be quite a number of continuations for this topic. There's a lot more to it than meets the eye.
If you feel inspired to find out more then do call me on 07555 807700 or leave a comment below and I'll be in touch as soon as I can.