How will the ISDN switch off impact your business?

In 2015 BT announced that they will be switching off the UK’s ISDN network by 2025.

Whilst 2025 may seem a long way off; after 2020 businesses will no longer be able to buy or upgrade to a system that utilises the ISDN network.

2020 is less than three years away and the switch-off means that ISDN is now considered a legacy product. This means that investment in these products is very likely to fall.

If your business uses ISDN, you will need to switch to a VoIP service.

Why do I need to switch?

While the PSTN and ISDN switch off won’t be taking place until 2025, by 2020 businesses will no longer be able to buy or upgrade to a system that utilises these networks. Since the announcement from BT back in early 2015, ISDN is regarded as a legacy network. This means that investment into this network will fall and eventually become difficult to maintain until its final switch-off.

What is the alternative? Hosted VoIP telephony

Hosted VoIP is a cloud based telephony solution. Instead of connecting to an on site phone system, your calls are routed over the internet via secure data centres.

Key Benefits

There are many benefits for switching to Hosted VoIP Telephony. These include:

Cost savings: No line rental, cheaper calls and free calls between your offices.

Support: Cloud based phone systems are ‘hosted’ off site in secure data centres. Therefore you are no longer responsible for the capital expenditure and long-term operating costs for hardware, maintenance, upgrades, monitoring, service-level management and general support. Equipment is always maintained at the highest, most up to date specification.

Reliability/Redundancy: The Data centres where the phone system is ‘hosted’ employ the latest, state of the art network security, anti-virus software and data backup. The data centres also provide far greater protection and environmental control to ensure the physical protection of equipment, all backed up by business continuity systems and “redundancy” to support disaster recovery.

Management: With a hosted phone system you will get a management console that lets you change configuration of the system, add or remove users, assign features to specific employees and monitor performance. All without the need for costly engineer call outs.

Scalability: The scalability provided by cloud infrastructure makes the phone system easy to expand as your business grows.

When should you switch to VoIP?

We recommend switching to VoIP sooner rather than later. Now that ISDN is viewed by many as a legacy platform, investment is very likely to fall. This could mean that the standard of the existing network, and support infrastructure, could begin to suffer the effects well before the 2025 switch-off date.