ISDN Telephony is ancient technology

Are you still using ISDN in your business?

In likeness to PSTN, (Analogue Lines), that are typically used at home for your phone & broadband line, ISDN, (Integrated Services Digital Network), blends several pairs of copper cables, allowing businesses to function with quite a few telephone calls at once. Following the pattern with all legacy forms of communication, ISDN is expensive and constraining; often seeing businesses spend more than a few hundred pounds per quarter for telephone lines & calls alone.

ISDN is the still the boss of voice communications for most businesses, but the end-of-life is already in sight for this 30-plus-year-old equipment. BT have broadcasted their plans to ‘switch off’ all these services by 2025, and therefore push the completion of VoIP (Voice-over-IP) telephony by trades up and down the country.

It’s time to change over, ISDN is old hat.

There has undoubtedly not been a greater time to assess your communications by choosing to cut your usage of ISDN whenever your contract passes. You can benefit from the immediate cost savings, while increasing your elasticity by moving to VoIP technology.

Using VoIP shouldn’t be a distressing & pricey experience – there are various services and options available, with such a cutthroat marketplace ensuring costs are kept to a minimum. Switching from older forms of telephony doesn’t mean you have to abandon your numbers; you can swiftly port these crossways onto VoIP, enabling you to carry on making & receiving calls as you always have done.

What happens to my internet connectivity?

Shifting from ISDN to VoIP means that your calls will no longer be running petrified over those sets of copper cables, but in its place across your broadband connection. Logically, this means you’ll require a moderately quick & stable internet connection to handle your volume of voice traffic, in addition to the data usage for browsing websites, sending/receiving emails and using multiple cloud tools.

In some areas this isn’t an instant possibility – if your business suffers from sluggish ADSL speeds and has yet to progress to a fibre connection of some form, you may be concerned about the prospect of doing away with the solidity of ISDN.

Nevertheless! In many cases we’ve seen the savings made from switching from ISDN to VOIP aid in the justification and financing of a dedicated fibre, (known as a Leased Line), connection. By reforming to a Leased Line, you’ll benefit from a superfast fibre connection directly from your properties to the BT Exchange and attain a much faster connection, both steady and supported by the network operator on a contractual service level agreement.

As Leased Lines are run on a dispersed basis to each premises, you are not constrained to the limitations of the current Openreach fibre rollout plans – which sees fibre run only from the Exchange to the local cabinets, (with copper still being used between your building & the cabinet as before). Leased Lines, along with a number of other connectivity options, are open to businesses wherever you may be positioned.

With the extra speed & data capacity brought with the installation of a Leased Line, any pain of switching to VoIP is eradicated. Your Leased Line would be more than suitable to carry your voice traffic over VoIP, meanwhile providing your team with a much faster & reliable connection to the internet than ever before.

We’re Cloudscape.

There are quite a few different aspects to such a project… but, we’re here to help.

We’ll get to know your business and determine the most appropriate solution to meet your technical requirements while being commercially sensible in cost and productive with time.

If you feel that you’re stuck in the dark ages with ISDN, please get in touch.