At all the shows, it is cloud this and cloud that - a bunch of doom and gloom on legacy telecom. I am calling bullsh!t to that right now.
The LD business is still making money (especially in Canada). The dial-up business is still propping up our friends at EarthLink and their rivals at NetZero and AOL. Those dial-up customers still need POTS lines. So do fax lines, alarms, elevators, paging and door buzzers. (I haven't heard of any IOC's filing bankruptcy yet AND Frontier is buying AT&T's copper business in CT for close to $2 Billion so.....)
Last I checked, you still needed Internet every where to access your cloud services - so DSL, EoC, T1, cable modem, fixed wireless and mobile data (3G/4G) are still in strong demand. Ethernet over copper is helping small businesses get big bandwidth affordably, especially symmetric bandwidth.
Yes, Hosted PBX and cloud services are the hot thing, but they still need Access. In fact, many ITSP's are now also network operators in order to handle the access (usually MPLS circuits) used to deliver a managed UC service. I think some of the squawking is due to the fact that many carriers are betting their very existence on cloud services. It doesn't mean that the whole chicken little sky is falling crap that I hear from the analysts at each show isn't hyperbole. One analyst in particular has been chirping the same tune for almost 3 straight years - 3 years!
I mention this because of current projects and that many quotes requests coming in are for plain jane Internet access in the 10-20 MB variety. It's a good sale. It's a staple like steak.
Yes, channel partners need to refresh their catalogs, the sooner the better -- but at the end of the day, you have to service YOUR CUSTOMER base, which may be at any point on the technology adoption curve.
"Skate to where the puck will be" is a great quote from NHL Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky.
