The Future of Telephony

The telephone has been a fundamental pillar of business communications since its inception, but two factors are having a critical impact on the future of telephony:

1. The pandemic drove a huge proportion of the workforce to shift to working from home, often removing their access to their business telephony system.
2. The planned switch-off of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) across many European countries.

In this blog, we will draw upon our experience of over 14 years in systems integrations, supporting Service Providers to launch hosted telephony services. We will discuss the anticipated changes to telephony services, whether traditional telephony still has a role to play in modern business, and how your organisation could benefit from these changes.

Telephony – is it still relevant?

It is easy to assume that landline phones will become a technology of the past due to an industry shift towards the ‘cloud’ and the way that has revolutionised telephony over the years. The cloud has enabled lower capital costs for businesses, whilst still allowing them to maintain the same platform features and functionalities, and it is a move that is positively impacting people worldwide.

No matter how technology evolves, telephony remains a critical business tool as evidenced by  a recent report from cloud-based communications provider, RingCentral. Key conclusions from the study were that over 90% of respondents said phones are considered a main communication tool, and over 70% prefer phone or in-person communication when handing retention, escalation, and dispute resolution issues. We are seeing that vendors are still investing heavily in phone research and development, with newly improved and updated models regularly coming to the market, albeit that new models are geared towards taking advantage of cloud telephony.

Switching off PSTN but switching on a new opportunity

The planned switch-off of the PSTN, which has been in use since 1876, represents an opportunity for our industry.

Regarding the reason for the move away from the legacy PSTN, BT (formerly British Telecom) has said that “Our current network is old and difficult to maintain…” and that “as an essentially 20^th century technology, the PSTN is increasingly out of kilter with the demands of 21^st century communications”.

It is reported that over 69% of UK businesses are still using landlines within their company, and that over 16 million telephone lines will need be transferred to IP networks within the next few years, which means that businesses of all sizes will need to find a new way to connect.

For many software solutions providers, this is a huge opportunity to help businesses complete the transition from a traditional PSTN connection to a cloud-based one.

Moving to the Cloud

Taking vital communication tools and software to the cloud may seem like a substantial move, but the planned switch-off of PSTN presents opportunities to make both revenue and margin for resellers.

The pandemic forced a lot of businesses to move to alternative methods of communication when shifting towards working from home, as many could no longer access their legacy telephone systems. One of the alternative options at the time was VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), which is a digital telephone service that lets users make and receive phone calls over the internet, instead of through the PSTN, and one way of doing this was through telephony applications from vendors such as Cisco, RingCentral, 8×8 and Microsoft.

While PSTN phones are becoming obsolete, alternative solutions, such as PC clients, mobile apps and Bluetooth headsets that leverage cloud-based telephony, continue to gain ground. As an example, Zoom is taking advantage of the growth in cloud telephony through their own Zoom Phone application.

STAC

Our telephony solution, STAC (Secure Telephony Adapter for Cloud), enables secure telephony integration to cloud services such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom Phone, and provides an ideal alternative to on-premise, legacy network systems.

We recently launched two variants of STAC:

1. STAC for Microsoft Teams – powered by AudioCodes.
2. STAC for Zoom Phone.

Our primary goal in delivering STAC is to ensure that all aspects of the service are easy for both the reseller and the end-user. For resellers, the combined expertise of the parties that deliver the service provides certainty that you are offering a best-of-breed solution that will complement the cloud communications platforms that you offer to your customers.

For end-user businesses, we provide the peace of mind that the communications infrastructure is resilient and secure. This means end-users can benefit from a telephony solution that is reliable, secure, and cost-effective – and end-users do not need any highly skilled communications engineers to maintain the service.

Implementation and Managed Services

In addition to the STAC offering, Nuvias UC can also, if required,
design and deliver these new telephony services and offer a managed service so that, going forward, the end-user can leverage our expertise to implement any moves, additions, configuration changes or deletions that they may need.

We are here to help

In this blog we discussed the major changes that are coming to telephony. We established that whether telephony is hosted via PSTN or cloud, telephony still has a crucial role to play in modern business. This represents an opportunity for you to make extra revenue, and Nuvias UC is on hand to support you with all elements of a full telephony solution, from hardware to the cloud platform, as well as the telephony element, services, and support.

For more information about how we can help, call: + 44 (0) 1635 225000

Resources:

https://help.business.bt.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/55133/~/the-pstn-and-isdn-switch-off%3A-what-it-means-for-you

https://glginsights.com/articles/zoom-microsoft-teams-and-slack-have-exploded-due-to-the-covid-19-pandemic-can-they-hold-onto-this-growth/