[VoiceOps] TDM -> IP Migration

[Mike Hammett]

Given my need to migrate from old Metaswitch gear to something new and Metaswitch abusing the market, I decided to re-evaluate my whole TDM-first position. I had a very engineering-first mindset because we are the only operator (aside from the incumbent telco) that has a local switch. Yes, we still depend on external places for SS7\SIGTRAN, but those are fairly easy to route, as opposed to TDM voice. I planted my flag on "we don't depend on Chicago, like everybody else." 


Well, nobody cares.The largest user in the area moved everything to Teams, so what point is there in me pushing something that no one cares about. SS7\SIGTRAN services are going up in price. DS3s are going up in price. TDM hardware is expensive. I don't know 10% of legacy telco as compared to what I know of IP. 


Freeing myself from TDM would certainly make finding my Metaswitch replacement easier. Sure, everyone is going to have some solution to handle it, but what if I didn't have that problem at all? 


Companies like Peerless and Inteliquent have both CLEC and VoIP provider-centric services. If I'm forklifting out my TDM gear, what are the advantages of staying CLEC-based instead of moving to IPES-based? From what I can tell, they're very similar. In both methods, I'm still responsible for 911, for number blocks, for porting, for a SIP interconnect, for my own switching, etc., etc. In both worlds (as is the PSTN), I'm limited to being single-homed. For instance, I couldn't use BOTH Inteliquent and Peerless simultaneously for a given TN. We don't yet have our IPES OCN, but that's hardly a large barrier. 


What are some things that I might not be thinking of? For those of you that have made similar migrations, which path did you choose and what did you wish you knew before the move? 




Yeah, lots of things in the air... looking to change basically how every aspect of voice in the network works... all at once (or nearly at once). About the only things that wouldn't be changing would be a couple of existing SIP providers and our subscriber gateways. Even our hosted PBXes would be changing, though more of a phased-in model. 




----- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 
http://www.ics-il.com 



Midwest Internet Exchange 
http://www.midwest-ix.com 



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