What’s the what’s the transition look like then in other countries across the world, and obviously we’re not the the only country that needs to do this. What’s gone before us and how’s that looked?
We’re not at first. I think, Estonia is a trailblazer in IP speech off.
In in other countries, they have successfully moved over switching off the PSTN Germany, and this is probably one of the bigger ones, Australia, always held up as a good example in you know, good communications and then how effective that was in it. UK is a slightly more difficult to market, I suppose, because you have openreach and I know Phil Law was somebody who’s gonna be talking about this of six fifty plus, different communication providers. Vacant media, vertically integrated serving their own, customers on that. So it is a slightly more challenging market.
And and we also have Ofcom, which is a very involved regulator, whose role in this migration program, and they’ve set their patients of communication providers, and and what they should be doing, which, is slightly hands off. We’re watching to see what’s going on and monitoring, but there are some expectations on UK providers that aren’t in place in other countries.
Such as maintaining access to, the emergency services and eventual power outage, and with a few other, around engagement and things like that. But MCPs, you know, obviously, this is something that is in response to meet the customers as well as the retirement of this legacy equipment. So they are taking those responsibilities and meeting those expectations.
But it is a different migration than another country’s and also the network architecture, without getting technical because I can’t. It is different in the UK. You might find in Germany, they, they’re able to do a little bit more of the PSN emulation, and that is, is over there. In France, for example, where they’re doing a regional approach to the migration of the five year notice period, they, there’s already a much larger IP base than we’re starting within the UK, and also bundled their services, they may have their TV delivered over IP services, slightly. It’s a different approach, but it is something that is happening across the world. No country’s gonna be left on PSTN.
Is there is there a large difference then for how transition looks for a micro company and SME and obviously large enterprises? Is there any sort of different challenges that they would face?
Yeah. I mean, I I I think underlying it all, it’s the same challenge because it’s it’s an analog line that is needing to be replaced with a an alternate solution that that’s IP based, but you tend to get different use cases with different sized enterprises. So micro enterprises will have probably more traditional use cases, more aligned to actually using the phone line. As a phone.
Those small businesses still rely on fax. We’ll have seen the the BBC News article that the the demise of the fax is now official So, you know, that’s it must be correct. So, you know, that that’s something that it you know, just signpost the changing use of communication. But I think also it’s it’s those micro enterprises that will typically, you know, use sort of, electronic point of sales terminals that might still be wired.
They might have that from a, for a long time ago. They haven’t moved that to a a SIM based, chip and pin machine or a, a sort of a IP card reader and it’s those things that might catch them out because a micro enterprise will not have dedicated departments to sort out its comms for it. So I think micro enterprises need to be aware of this change happening and take it on board and and see what it means for them. And if they need more explanation, have a have a conversation with your your provider.
SMEs obviously stepping up, they they got slightly different needs again. They might have multiple offices who need to be, connected and how those offices are today might differ with how they’re connected tomorrow. Again, it could be different product sets, so you’ve got, uses of the ISDN lines for multichannel, solutions for for SMEs. So if somebody’s using, an ISDN thirty, service at the moment, and that’s provided, typically that that’s an openreach input that will need to be changed to an IP based solution.
If it’s just providing thirty channels of comms, then it could be a comms to a comms solution if they’ve got more, data based use their database, data use for that, that particular, solution. And again, it could be something that’s slightly different that would be better used. The the other thing as well, I think, there is the opportunity here. So you’ve got a comm solution that you could say right.
I will just do the bare minimum replace line x with line y, and it’ll still go into the PBX that is twenty years old sat in the basement because they don’t really want to touch that. And you can make it work for IP, but it won’t be ideal. So actually, is this the opportunity to say, well, if you’ve got it, tink around the edges, could you do something a bit more clever and move to, sort of cloud based u unified comms which will then give you as a as an SME, a real advantage in terms of how you communicate communicate out with staff, communicate that with customers, you know, you get WhatsApp communications sort of integrated into your your system, and and those are the opportunities there for that sort of slightly bigger, more upscale, company.
And then interestingly, as, say, the larger companies, typically, they might actually have more reliance on these lines because they have particular use cases. So even if they’ve got a massive comms budget, and they’ve moved to IP for everything that that is centrally driven. There’s still these individual use cases for particular lines that actually, if they were given a free choice, they’d probably say, we’ll keep on that technology if they can because it works, and it doesn’t need to do anything clever.
But because that technology is end of life, we do need to replace it. And those are the ones that, that, you know, we have to do little bit of clever thinking about and provide the the innovative solution that still works still provides resilience to to those larger entities.
The other the other I think big challenge, the more footprint you have, the higher the risk that you won’t know exactly what it is, more where it is. So a big shout out is, no, try and understand what you’ve got today so that you know what you have to move to tomorrow. Because if you don’t know what it is or where it is, you you’re at the risk of them coming to a switch off date and think I think I’ve done everything. It’s all good and then a mystery service might stop working, which again, you know, is is not good for anyone. It’s not good for for customer, it’s not good for for a provider, and, you know, you’re playing catch up to try and get that right. So getting that sort of network audit becomes more important. The bigger that that the, the size of the business that that, that you’re dealing with.
Oh, well, thank you both for that. I really really appreciate that. Just to round off them, would would there be sort of two key takeaways that you’ve both got that you’d suggest would sort of swap everything that we’ve discussed?
I’ll get info and and still the easy ones. Yeah, I think I think the key one is, act now. This is happening right now. So speak with your provider. So have that conversation early, the early you prepare, the better the result will be.
Yeah. Completely stop what I was gonna say. Thanks, Steve.
So it’s a passion?
Yeah. It is that. It is kind of understanding, what your lines are being used for. And if you do need a bit of help and support, your communications provider is is best pla
