Dial Concentrators - TNT / APX8000 R.I.P.

Tue May 11 06:37:53 UTC 2010

On Tue, 11 May 2010, Alastair Johnson wrote:

> Welcome to what telcos have been dealing with for 10 to 20 years with product 
> lifecycles.  The PSTN isn't exactly a growing market, and has lots of EOL 
> switches, yet it continues to run.  Secondary support markets, grey markets, 
> and strategic migrations to carry internal sparing.
>
> Or you find a cost effective way to replace it with something; or you accept 
> that the revenue vs. cost-to-maintain is too high and just kill the product.

Some telcos are starting to kill off legacy services as they reach the end 
of their life cycle.  I saw an application from Verizon in West Virginia 
to modify their tariff to remove SMDS as a service.  According to the 
filing, no customers were using it and vendor support for it was coming to 
an end.  I'm assuming at some point that Verizon stopped selling the 
service and quietly told any remaining customers that they needed to 
transition to other services because SMDS would be turned off on a certain 
date.  I've heard of some LECs starting to mull dropping frame relay as a 
supported service as well...

jms