My name’s Tom Boyle. I’m head of telecoms at Sheffield Teaching Hospital. I also co chair the telecoms best value for health care to let you guys introduce yourselves?
Phil. So hi. I’m Phil Lawors, senior manager, we’re in the openreach AllIP program.
And I’m Steve Mills. I’m head of customer advocates within Gamma in the enterprise area, and I’ll be trying to shine a light on the mysterious CP that was mentioned in lots of the previous podcast discussions.
That’s great. So I obviously touched on sort of the basics of what’s happening when it’s happening. I’d like to maybe touch on now how how how you get through sort of a transition to the the new well to IP, sort of any challenges that you’ve seen in the sector already. I don’t know if we want to want to start off with any sort of more detailed key considerations. I don’t know which one you’d like to to jump on first.
I can certainly talk about some of the migrations within public and private sector that we’ve been involved in. I think the key consideration is always understand the environment you’re in. So you’re gonna have and it’s gonna vary hugely, but I’m gonna focus maybe on public sector and and those larger enterprises is having a view of the numbers you’ve got because you may have a whole range of numbers from a whole range of different providers, and and understanding what’s in place and what else is connected to it, normally what happens is you go through and you think about the ninety five percent, the ninety eight percent of services, you get to the end of the project and somebody goes, I’ve got a vitally important fax service that this relies on this GP needs this sent to me, or we’ve got signaling that goes over these PSTN lines or over that the end that’s not supported by by IP.
And then I think they tend to be the the key ones. The other lessons learned I think is is if you have numbers is is porting of those numbers and moving of those numbers because when you’re doing that migration project within those environments, that’s your single big risk point. Mhmm. Because what you’ll often have done is install the technology, tested the technology, tried the new numbers on the technology and then it’s that moment that the live numbers come onto the platform is your key risk in your key consideration.
So I think definitely understand your environment understand your numbers and the services you’ve got and and be aware of the individualities.
I think in a micro SME climate, it’s slightly different you’re going to be more likely leading on alarm lines, CCTV lines, PDQs. You’re not going to have huge systems to integrate with whereas in enterprise and and public sector you’ll have legacy systems that have always been there and always worked that way that and I think they’re the areas that are going to trip people up. I think the technology is a general rule for PSTN switch off. Most of the technologies there, the data networks there with Segea, with FTP with Ethernet, the voice services are there with hosted providers, MS team, SIP trunking, mobile. I think all the technologies there already just understanding the nuances of your of your environment.
Just to add into what Steve said there. So we’ve come across some customers in the past and rather large customers.
Who think there’s been a full migration to all IP. And when you asked the question and pushed and probed, you found out that what they’ve done is migrated the easy stuff. It’s it’s the business as usual things.
Mhmm.
And it’s the silly things that they hadn’t thought about.
You know, it’s the CCTV, it’s the lift lines, and it’s the, you know, the the concierge or whatever at the front desk. So, what one of the things we always encourage people to do is have a good old audit, find out, you know, what do they have today have a good understanding. Do they need all the lines? Cause often people have a whole stack of lines that aren’t that aren’t being used. So it’s a it’s a good sort of cost check as well because there could be some lines that could simply be ceased. But understand, you know, what ones have been used for, think about if they’re required for the future, talk to their communication providers to understand what the replacement products are. And as Steve mentioned from an openreach point of view, we have products available to to suit most most use cases.
And that’s backed up by having a test lab where people can do the testing to understand if some of the special services that people have will work over an IP network I think Openreach, you’ve got a particular useful product as well that not everybody talks about or knows about, and it’s the ability to go into a line in ISBN or a PSTN, and do a temporary out of service.
You’re not decommissioning it. You’re and and that’s certainly in the past when we’ve done those project. That’s a great way of finding is the service liven being used and if you temporarily turned it off, what would happen. Mhmm.
And and that way you’re not having to reprovision a reorder new lines on long lead times you can just go and need to turn it back on. And that works really well. And I think a good point that I think one of the other sessions discussed was getting into that utility sector. Right?
There’s remote stations where IP connectivity might not be available. You need to have a really clear view if there’s no fiber, there’s no copper. You know, you might be relying on a really, really long copper line into electrical substation on the top of Toddmond and Moore.
You need to be thinking about those plans because you might need to look at four g, five g or satellite, and that might be a different delivery in this various consideration. So that would certainly be the level of detail you need to be looking at and there’ll be certain problem areas that are going to come up time and time again. But I think overall industries certainly from what we see has a reasonable view of it. I mean lift lines and alarm lines would have always been the biggies, but I know the lift line companies have got dual SIM cards going in lots of lift. There’s replacement plans. You can guarantee they won’t all get done on time though, which is I guess the call to action is if you’ve got those services, you need to be contacting your Lyft people, Schneider, people like that, Shindler, so we’re not Shneider, or possibly Shneider, and saying, what we’re gonna do about these lifts, what’s your upgrade process when you’re getting people out to say.
So you both touched on it there loosely then, but what what are the technologies that you that that sort of companies are gonna look to move to. Do you know, do you wanna give a brief overview of the different offers there?
I mean, this is gonna be really, really broad, I think. So I’m gonna try and I’m gonna try and segment it with with your help from Openreach would be I think you need to take your voice communication as one element. You need to take your data communication as another element. And then you need to look at signaling and the sort of transfer of signaling traffic and I think if you keep it in those broad frameworks. I think you probably is is a nice way of building the solutions.
I think the data path is reasonably well defined although we can discuss the actual on-site process and what that looks like, but you’ve got Segea, which is basically ADSL without a PSTN line. You’ve got a five to the premises. VDSL.
So it’s call me.
I’m trying to keep it at a high level because I think you’re gonna know what VDSL is. So we’ll go, we just call it broadband keep that simple, but without the ability to make a phone call on it so you can’t plug the argos phone in and ring somebody up.
You’ve got fiber to the premises, which is not is not rolling out as quickly as I think everybody would like but it’s a more complex delivery from your end. Do you agree with that?
Well, we’re rolling out like fury.
So it’s a it has a twenty five million build schedule book at the end of twenty twenty six. And that’s a rate of around about sixty two thousand premises a week. So it’s pretty, pretty fast, actually. And there are alternative network suppliers doing a similar sort of activity. So there’s an awful lot of bill going on in the UK at the moment. Yeah.
I think it’ll never be fast enough for industry.
You know, they want who can have a hundred meg download on my FTP instead of my three meg ADSL that’s miles from the exchange.
So I think that that but it’s a really reasonably well defined product. There’s solutions out there. E FM doesn’t exist anymore. I think that’s good end of life.
And you’ll be looking at five rethernet, which is from sort of ten meg, anything up to ten gig, hundred gig at the very top end. All those products are there now. The migration path’s relatively well defined.
Those products are available. Then I think you go into the voice. Voice is a for me My background has always been IP voice. So it’s a reasonably well defined path.
There are SIP trunking products. There are hosted PBX products. There are UCaaS products. There are PSTN line replacement products.
There’s a whole raft of solutions that are available in that area now.
That you can go to your any provider and they’ll be able to provide you with. And then the remote signaling, I think you’re seeing certainly three g, four g, and we’re seeing some satellite as well now coming into those hard to reach difficult areas, fast start environments.
So I think they’re probably the three areas and the three products of where they sit.
And just to add into that, I think what we’d like to see moving forward is a far greater, rate of migrations. So, yeah, we we do have products out there, an awful lot of where we have, products, they’re gonna be closed. W. R. Where where they’re based. Do have these products available, and and we want to use migrations.
And whilst there are some difficult use cases, you know, the majority of services can be supported over those IP products.
Yeah. And I think and it’s interesting. I think if you took certainly, we look at our asserting our best, the majority of the PSTN connections we’ve got are primarily in the enterprise space only support and broadband, which should in theory be an easy migration. And then all the way to the bottom end, we still got a lot of people with PSN lines for the phone call comes in on there. They put the phone in the answer it that way. They go through that. They’re the ones that I think need to think about the transition.
In some ways for those where it’s a single line, it’s one number their broadband’s running on it. The transition period is relatively quick. It’s relatively simple. There was absolutely no need to wait till twenty twenty five to do that. You’re in danger if you do that of having one of the big companies put put an order for a thousand migrations on BT. They’re gonna prioritize a thousand migrations over your one line and that they’re just not gonna be enough engineering resource in our company and your company to cover those ones and twos when you’ve got people who have tried to do thousands at a time.
So the worst thing you can do is think it’s not a problem today. Let’s leave it. Let let’s wait. I can wait until twenty twenty five. It’s only one line. It’s only one number. Take advantage of of what’s available now and what it looks like to to make that migration straight away.
And we have trials underway at the moment in Salisbury Milden Hall as a as guess you know, which is a microcosm of what’s happening across the wider UK. And we have the end date when the products will be withdrawn in April twenty twenty three. You know, we’ve got five months. And and what we are seeing is that those those migrations that are straightforward. They’re happening and that that’s we’re reasonably comfortable in terms of speed of that because resource is an issue, especially in Salisbury where every new line provide is a is an install.
The concern we have is that some of the more difficult things are being held back. And if it is back ended, especially from the national the national or the UK wide withdrawal in twenty twenty five. There won’t be enough resource. So we’ve got to make sure people do engage early to get the assets sorted out, they figure out what is required and get those orders placed quickly.
What’s interesting is we are actually seeing building companies now doing new housing environment saying actually to you guys, you just put a DP on the edge and you know what?
We’ll we’ll do the fiber blow, we’ll put it all in. Probably not as many as you’d like, but It’s certainly enough in in our area where in our business, we’re seeing them come to us saying, what what if we did this? What would that look like? How do you support that? So I think it is that there is a change coming.
So Openreach has been doing new build FTTP since so our first one went live in two thousand and eight. And then we’ve been ramping up and and broadly any any new bill site over, sort of, I don’t know, ten plots or whatever it is gets FGP as business as usual. Alright. Pretty good. That is good.
Phil, you touched on it then. Could you could you draw any examples of the challenges that you’ve faced in the test beds that you’ve got? Is there any sort of specific ones that you could go into that might give us an idea of the challenges that we might face sort of in the next coming years nationally.
The first issue is what I’ve just mentioned already. We we do have a problem in that the more complex orders aren’t coming in. Okay.
So if you look at the consumer, the residential base, you know, my, that is where I would say a high ninety percent of all the volume is.
And and what the reason for that we think is that communication providers, you know, aren’t sure necessarily what to what to sell. And how do I approach a customer base? And bearing in mind that, the residential sale is to is to one house out of one premise and and broadly, you know, whilst a business could be a corner shop, above and beyond that, you’re getting into sort of, multiple premises, possibly over multiple locations. And the question is, you know, how do you make a sale to a national organization who has won premise in in a trial location because they want they buy in a national contract and and why is that different? So they’re trying to figure out how how they do make those sales.
We have seen, in fact, it was during lockdown. We had some issues with certain communication providers, because we We had premises on stop sell for non FTP products and in fact we we we granted exceptions whereby a certain, high street outlet could order legacy products. It helped them get around the problem. And the reason was that their service provider wasn’t ready with their product.
So it just shows to us that we’ve got to engage early. We’ve got to make sure that people do do test things out. So we have the test lab. We’ve got we have six CPs in there, six of the largest CPs, and and the testing has proven interesting in terms of what what does work if you fiddle about with it a bit, but also those things that just fly through straightforward, which is interesting learning.
Steve, anything to add to that in sort of any involvement that you’ve had in any?
No. Not in the bespoke ones. I think the ones I’ve seen have been door open systems, at that day, I do think the pandemic changed a lot of the way businesses are delivering telephony. There seem to be a move away from an an on premise on-site PBX that might use a a PSTN line to open the door when somebody rings the buzzer, we’ve seen a huge migration people moving to teams. That seems to be teams UCaaS, I don’t want to be I don’t want to be pushing one vendor at the BBC, sir.
But certainly going to that UCaaS model, that headset model, that seems to be the way it is. And you’re right. It’s those we we used to put them on ATAs, PDQs, they’re the they’re the ones that need the testing, aren’t they? I think the majority of the products certainly that we see work work okay. There’s always the one that they find in the back of a cupboard there. There’s not that’s been there for twenty five years that does something that nobody’s quite sure what because Colin retired in nineteen eighty four and it’s just been there since. I think they’re they’re the ones that you’ve got to make sure are not running mission critical systems and be aware of.
And why thing I would say on on that. So the the testing we have seen in our lab, by vendors intending to test using an ATA over an ATA device. That’s where we have problems.
And what we what we haven’t seen is a vendor that’s come in and tested across all six networks. Or our six CP networks where it’s worked on all of them in a consistent fashion. So our recommendation is that ATA ports aren’t used for legacy devices. They should only be used for their intended purpose, which is to make telephone calls.
So you mentioned lift lines. So we’ve had lift line vendors combination testing, and anything that’s, a flashy device with a lot of DTMF, you have problems. Any simple device that only makes a telephone call no there’s no issue with those. On the other hand, we’ve had those vendors who do IP testing.
Everything works. There’s no problem. Yeah. Hence, our recommendation don’t don’t rely upon a legacy special service device continuing to function utilizing an ATA port in IP network.
I do think most of the CP certainly we’re seeing in the retail space, most of the alarm providers are all running IP now. There seem to be with it. Most of the PDUs are on themes that like most of the companies have an offering. It’s whether they can get around that end to end customer base of companies with ones and twos in the relevant timeline. That will be there. So in testing on the ATAs, they’re not always the most reliable bit of technology are there. We’ve certainly where we’ve tested deck handsets and other devices in ATAs.
They can depend on which brand you use. They need a bit of conflict where they can fail. They’re not the most reliable.
I think guidance for me would be IP first rather than trying to convert what you’ve got.
Agreed.
Yeah. So what what does a transition look like then for a typical business?
I think I think again I’m gonna break it down into the two two two distinct product areas because I think the experience is is is very different. So from a from a data, and from a data experience, the really interesting part is is just to understand. Okay. So I’ve got this VDSL.
No non v a DSL. Is that right? The one that’s I’ve got this DSL product that I need to migrate. Go to my provider, yeah, I want to migrate to Segea, which is the standard offering.
Okay, mister customer great. We place an order in Openreach. Yeah. You then have a look at it and you go that’s great.
What what happens then?
So it depends what the customer has today. Okay. So if they already have a five to the cabinet based solution, the migration is reasonably straightforward because typically the modem would be the same modem. Yeah. And and depending upon the use case, if they, again, it goes down to do they have a special service device?
Yeah.
And if that’s communicating over an analog interface onto the onto the wholesale land rental line, the question is does that work on an IP environment and all, hence, they need to test.
If there’s no issue there or it could be that have bought a new device, the migration could be straightforward, which means a no, it could mean a no visit. Okay.
So say, I work for a national retailer, I’ve got a hundred sites.
I’m transitioning from FTTC, to Sajir. I’ve got my Openreach box on the wall. I’ve then got my, I called Gamma provider device because I went for Gamma, do gamma need to send an engineer to change the configuration of that router, or does it just plug straight in and carry on working and the PSTN stops? Do I need and engineer to come tramping around my hundred hundred stores to change it.
What what would happen?
So for a simple migration, our assumption would be that you wouldn’t have to visit for your equipment. That’s for you to call. We we wouldn’t know. Our anticipation is you wouldn’t need to visit So so we could do a no site migration.
Sorry. No site visit migration and and that that is very straightforward. The question is the level of certainty you have that once the migration’s finished, everything works fine. And that that goes down to the need to test.
So with with a hundred sites, my recommendation is you’d run one or two. Yeah. So it worked. And if that worked very well, just whack the ordering for the remaining ninety eight.
And then manage that via communications, manage the rest of the business and take it from there. Yeah. Okay. That that’s actually relatively straightforward.
Mhmm.
You know, I think a lot of people as you say, if you’ve got to change the voice services, that becomes a little bit more complicated because you’ve potentially got a published number that somebody rings.
Yeah. And that’s been in the advertising in the yellow pages for twenty five years. Everybody knows it. Yeah.
I think in that that process for me to is a is a longer process and a little bit more disruptive but reasonably I think well defined. So you would pick a product of choice that could either be a cloud number solution that just delivers a call to your mobile. It could be putting it onto a phone system, putting it onto a phone system that just a single use environment or a multi tenant environment, which means multiple sites. And then it’s just a case of porting that number into the provider I mean, most telecoms companies have got porting agreements with each other.
We’ve got BT, Virgin, or two, all of those people. And then when that port happens, the number just transfers off that line into the cloud and that number works on your new system.
You touched on that last year. I just thought I’d interject is that How how disruptive then is that four a business? How that that number porting, obviously, I’ve experienced it. We’re in the midst of experiencing it now. To touch a little bit on how disruptive that can be?
I think first of all, there’s there’s two ways to port a number. There’s a regulated port that offcoming in charge of is we’ve got a regulated grant with BT. Therefore, there’s a process and escalations that follow. And then there’s if you don’t have a porting agreement, there’s there’s not as much governance around it. Generally, it’s about two minutes of number, the downtime, and I think the ones to be careful of is if you’re porting a number off a PSTN line with openreach into the cloud that you’re if you don’t think about the broadband and re number, you could lose service on that line. Because when we port that number that lane ceases with you, that’s accurate, isn’t it?
I think what I would say is you you gotta think in terms of the nature of the business. So how important is it for the business for continuity of service? So if it if it’s a a service, a business whereby they have lots of incoming calls, clearly if the line is down for any any amount of time, that’s a problem. And if you think about, you know, moving from the corner shop up to a a national bank, you wouldn’t want migrations to happen at a five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, which could be the busiest time for for either one of those, which comes down to the point of understanding the nature of the business.
One of the things that I would add as well is that the larger the business we we think that the sort of migration that’s going to happen is a case of providing a new connection a a period of power running, making sure that everything’s comfortable. That’s that’s the model. Does it work? Are we happy to go right?
Go push the button and do the final number port? That’s how I think this is going to go.
I think as well it differs. Yeah. I think in in your public sector environment, you will have built the voice solution you will have picked the technology going to. You’ll have done test numbers, and the process will be migrating from a legacy ISDN into something probably SIP trunking.
Yeah. And and that is you would experience a very, very short downtime as those numbers moved over to that environment. But you’ve done all your testing. You’ve signed it off, then it’s about managing risk and managing those porting times and making sure if anything does go wrong that you’ve got escalations in place.
And actually sometimes you’re better doing it in hours than out of hours because everyone’s working to fix stuff in hours and you’re better dealing with a risk of a short downtime on an individual number basis, you know, all go and wrong and then try to ring people at ten o’clock at night when they’re not not necessarily best place to fix it.
I suppose from my perspective as well, and from my own experience, I think it’s important to determine the fact that actually it’s only the inbound service that’s interrupted.
I know a lot of people that I speak to in health care are extremely nervous of any downtime since the pandemic and depending on how you’re set up if you’re on prem, if you’re not, is that internal telephony still works. You can still dial out provided you’re not sort of changing a lot of things at once. So I think that’s we we found that well I certainly find that that’s that’s their conversations I’m having with a lot of peers at the moment.
And I think I think also just to add on that. My view is that the larger the business, you’ve got to look at it as a project. And people have to be and the people have to be aligned and I get your point about being, you know, working in hours. Might take is the larger the business.
You probably want to do it out of hours with specific project teams in each organization.
Yeah. I’d agree.
Thanks both. I think we’ll look to draw that episode to a close. I’ve just finished off with what you’d both say was maybe your key considerations, your key takeaways from the sort of stuff that we discussed.
I would say no your estate and have your plan already well agreed before we get anywhere near twenty twenty five, have your project resource approved and signed off and be aware of any budgetary constraints you might have.
I wouldn’t say the same thing actually, but given you said it first.
That’s why it went first.
My my take would be haven’t you started yet?
Mhmm. That you can’t leave it. You can’t do it too soon.
Yeah.
Especially if the technology is already there. It’s not like we’re we’re doing anything groundbreaking at this point. It’s it’s a very, very well established technology that everybody’s moving to.
Thank you, Beth.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
