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

Tue May 11 03:22:27 UTC 2010

Mark Foster wrote:
> Does this not highlight a wider issue?
> 
> I realise that dialup is hardly 'cutting edge' but there are providers out
> there with a significant number of dialup customers still on the books.
> Surely there's still a market for (what should be by now) a
> straightforward, well known piece of kit?
> 
> In parts of the world where broadband is not ubiquitous and dialup remains
> useful as a Plan-B or is simply the only choice (for whatever reason),
> what are the practical choices now?
> 
> Whilst folks may not be fielding 'new' dialup kit, I dare say that we're
> going to be continuing to see dialup customers on the books for the next 5
> years, perhaps a lot longer?  That's a whole product lifespan...

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.

aj

p.s. UTStarcom was still supporting the [former USR/3com] TotalControl 
chassis as of about 2 years ago; I don't know if they still do.  They 
were positioning it as a migration platform for legacy X.25 networks.