Telecoms – everyone’s an expert

Telecoms – everyone’s an expert

I have worked in telecoms most of my working life and I have seen much change on one hand and yet paradoxically very little on the other.

Telecom to most people appears to mean telephony – I.e. a device for speech for use at home, in the office or whilst mobile, and from this perspective, apart from changes in phone set designs and disparate approaches from vendors on the layouts and labelling conventions (some use simple text whilst others use icons that I can’t for the life of me work out – so what hope is there for the uninitiated) there has been very little change. Even the newer entrants from the data World have taken a fairly conventional approach, which is probably understandable.

There is much change talked about more at the large enterprise end of the commercial market place, and this is at an infrastructure (plumbing) level. IP or Internet Protocol to give it its full name is a different approach to transmission of the voice signals that for most of us means very little. After all, who made a fuss over marketing the fact that the “old world” was TDM or Time Division Multiplexing? So what! Does it really matter? Perhaps not, but then again perhaps it does – the answer lies in the “what does it mean to my business if I change/don’t change”. The impact could be very little; however, it could deliver significant additional capability for your organisation and cost savings too – especially if you can share traffic on inter-office links, and use other low cost network carriers for some traffic. There is no simple answer to the conundrum, it just needs careful consideration from your perspective for your business, and weighing up the pros and cons – because there could well be some, for example, if your data infrastructure is already creaking at the seams, it could well require an investment to update before adding voice as well. A lot of this will depend on your organisations approach to return on investment and how you measure the benefits etc. Just get some independent advice before jumping in.