The End of ISDN

The latest news coming from BT is the end is now in sight for the aging UK ISDN network. Gavin Patterson, BT Group CEO, has announced that BT intend to migrate all customers on to the IP network by 2025. This plan is not really new but for the first time there is now an end date in the diary. BT envisages their network will be a single IP core network replacing all legacy networks and platforms this is a big change that will affect virtually every business in the UK. Patterson commented “We already serve many thousands of customers in businesses using IP, our goal is by 2025 all of our voice customers will be served using an IP with a premises solution and will migrate off the traditional telephony platform.”

Mark Viccars of Digi Toolbox commented “This is not really a big surprise and is actually a welcome indication of where UK Telecoms is going. We have been pushing the benefits of SIP over the past 4 years and last year, for the first time, saw Digi Toolbox deploy more SIP trunks than ISDN lines. SIP is a far more secure service and offers an incredible amount of flexibility”.

As of August 2013, there were 3.2 million ISDN channels in the UK and although BT do not have all of these on their network, a significant number of ISDN customers in the UK now have a date from which they will no longer be in service and customers who are using them will be looking to move. It has been suggested that this gradual change will start to see new ISDN services being limited as less copper is deployed.

Call the Digi Toolbox team today to discover how this affects your business and what options are available.