What's the Skinny on M6 and the TDM Transition?

Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

What's the Skinny on M6 and the TDM Transition?

Broadsoft acquired Genband's M6 platform in 2008. Six years later, there still isn't an upgrade path. I hear that it was declared end of life, but can't confirm that in writing.

PingTone and GLOBALINX deployed BroadWorks alongside their M6 platforms (see here and here). That seems like an expensive choice - and you are doubling down on BSFT.

M5 Networks (now ShoreTel Sky) migrated to their own platform. Nexogy just went with Netsapiens. I'm shocked that there isn't a softswitch platform that utilizes Skinny, so that the migration wouldn't involve the handsets.

With the TDM-to-IP conversion in its planning stages, the IOCs, the CLECs and the ILECs have to begin planning for VoIP - residential as much as business. For the residential market, the service provider (SP) has to provide enough value to keep the customer from swapping to cell phones only.

All that residential revenue is in jeopardy. And somehow that VoIP line has to be tied to mobile. The residential market is actually what has been propping up rural ILECs since the beginning. The USF and CAF money is tied to the residential subscriber count. (Recently, it was tied to the broadband subscriber count.) The IOC's have to pump up the broadband and invest in a softswitch. That's a lot of CAPEx for some of them. I wonder how many sales or mergers will occur in the next 3 years.

The CLECs have a similar but less threatening problem. Many CLECs have already transitioned to IP from TDM. (Check your PRI, most often it is just PRI signaling from the IAD box on the premise.) Alarm companies like ADT are worried - worried enough to protest to the FCC. Even the rural ILEC plus CLEC, Windstream, is protesting AT&T's pilot plan for TDM-to-IP transition.

This transition to all-IP will be a boon to service providers and to softswitch makers - whether the SP chooses Metaswitch, Netsapiens, Broadsoft, Phoenixsoft or some other platform.



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