Dealing with PSTN migration
As an incumbent service provider in an increasingly saturated fixed voice market, you face the declining profitability of your PSTN. With severe competition, the average price per minute of voice calls is decreasing; moreover, cable operators are offering attractive service bundles; alternative VoIP providers are offering low tariffs using third-party access networks, and some customers are abandoning fixed voice lines in favor of mobile phones.
At the same time, your operational costs are flat at best, with a trend to increase as the TDM network becomes older and obsolete. In fact, the eventual cost of running the network will no longer be justified by the revenue the network generates.
To meet these challenges, you are looking to migrate your PSTN to an IP network. Remaining competitive means optimizing the delivery of traditional voice services while creating an all-IP network capable of delivering new voice and multimedia services. This dual-pronged strategy makes sense. As broadband penetration continues to grow, you can combine your investment in the modernization of the PSTN with the building out of IPTV and high-speed Internet access networks — two areas currently undergoing substantial growth. Adopting an IP- and Ethernet-based platform with the flexibility of bringing fiber as close as economically possible to the end user, will also let you achieve your goal of converged voice and data access networks, with minimum cost of ownership.
As part of their strategic initiative, service providers should re-evaluate current service offerings and product lifecycles, and prioritize services to be migrated onto next-generation network architecture. It’s not efficient to migrate all services to the next- generation network at the same time — service providers should take a step-by-step approach for network optimization. Network optimization should be based on increasing network capacity and improving operational efficiency.
Yankee Group
