Who wants to take a trip down memory lane? As anyone that has been around longer than a couple of decades can attest, hardly any industry has transformed in such a dramatic way in the past decade than the telecommunications industry. In my teenage years and early 20’s during the late 1970’s and early 80’s, the only “wireless” options you had were the Motorola FM band radios that had a limited range, or the more common CB radio that was more of a trucker entertainment and smoky-avoiding device than anything that could be considered productive communications.
Then in 1983, a company called Ameritech launched a phone on the first 1G network called the DynaTAC 8000x,which cost $100 million to develop and over a decade to reach the market.Even with a talk time of 35 minutes and a 10-hour recharge time, the phone caught on and had high consumer demand. Smaller cellular phones followed, including the much-loved original Motorola RAZR flip phone. On the wireline side, traditional telecom generally consisted of copper CO (central office)
and leased lines that interconnected business locations together. Dial-up modems were in common use, with the internet in its infancy and far from being a vehicle for anything more than basic web pages and chat rooms.
For anyone that had to deal with the AT&T monopoly as I did, it wasn’t a pleasant experience to pour over a tariff proposal and the fine print of intra-LATA, inter-LATA, the LEC (local exchange carrier) variables and everything else that could either contain long distance and toll-free line costs or lock you into a long-term rate that was too high. It was a constant game of trying to outsmart the carriers and exercise any leverage you could to avoid paying too much.
As for telecom manufacturers, big companies such as Northern Telecom (Nortel), Lucentaka Avaya, Mitel, and others made a lot of money making, installing, and maintaining proprietary protocols and configurations. They worked hard to get businesses invested in their hardware as captive customers, so they could perpetuate recurring revenue streams for maintenance and support. The equipment needed to route calls, from CSU/DSU's, to multiplexers, to station and T1 controller cards, plus the dedicated wiring to each individual station was both expensive and complex.
Flash forward to 2018: With the rise of broadband technologies and open standards, much of the practices of the old-school telecom companies has went the way of the dinosaur. Of note, Nortel had a landmark bankruptcy in 2009 that left shareholders, pensioners, and employees with enormous losses, and has been regarded as the largest bankruptcy in Canadian history. Interestingly, Mitel, another Canadian company, adapted to the shift in market demand, and went from traditional TDM PBX systems to nearly exclusive VoIP products and services. Cellular phones are now commodities that practically everyone in America has in their pocket or purse, but the most dramatic shift has been in business communications.
No longer does a business have to lock in to expensive hardware, with an on-premise PBX, or expensive long distance contracts with carriers such as AT&T. With increased reliability combined with a faster internet to carry quality voice traffic, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has been the catalyst for comparatively cheap alternatives and a slew of hosted PBX and Voice companies that now compete for your business telecommunications budget, and most offer free unlimited calling within the U.S. and Canada. All of a sudden, long distance costs are no longer a factor in negotiating a telecom contract!
To name some of the top options, there is 8x8, DialPad, Vonage Business, Mitel (which acquired Shoretel), MegaPath and plenty more. You can either purchase or rent phones from these companies, or just buy them yourself from your favorite electronics store and plug them into your business network. There may be a few tweaks needed to get everything working as intended, including knowing how restrictive your firewall settings are, but overall, it is much easier to acquire and get a business phone system running in-house than it was only a few years ago.
On top of the lower costs associated with VoIP, there is also been a dramatic rise in “technological convergence.” This convergence offers massive opportunities for the development
of new value-added services and efficiency gained through unified and integrated mail, fax, applications, instant messaging and chat, and conferencing across a wide range of platforms, from traditional PC's, to tablets, phones, and other devices. The dissemination of information and ability to collaborate and communicate with co-workers, colleagues, and customers is at an unprecedented high.
If you are still running on a traditional PBX system, I would encourage you to seriously explore moving to a cloud hosted system in the near future. It will ultimately save your business money while providing added flexibility and versatility in call routing, functions, and features.
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