Thursday, June 27, 2024

POTS, PSTN cannot afford to retire

Anybody not involved in the telephone business will probably be surprised to find that the old TDM telephone networks are still very much alive and in place. The old technologies were supposed to be phased out and replaced by digital technologies. The FCC started talking about this before 2010. In 2013, Tom Wheeler, the FCC Chairman at the time, announced an effort to force the needed changes, which was dubbed the IP Transition. The goal of the transition was to upgrade and replace the public switched telephone network that was used by every telco, CLEC, and cable company for exchanging voice traffic.

https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2024/06/27/can-we-please-kill-legacy-telephone-requirements/

Analog voice service over the legacy publicly switched telephone network (PSTN) was declared at end of life in 2009 -- around the same time the United States should have fully replaced it with Internet protocol (IP) delivered over fiber to the premise (FTTP). It wasn't because AT&T and Verizon couldn't afford to retire it as FTTP modernization lagged.

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