[126292] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Dial Concentrators - TNT / APX8000 R.I.P.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alastair Johnson)
Mon May 10 23:23:20 2010
Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 11:22:27 +0800
From: Alastair Johnson <aj@sneep.net>
To: Mark Foster <blakjak@blakjak.net>
In-Reply-To: <91db8ec9557dc4ac9020d56cf1e719e9.squirrel@webmail.blakjak.net>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
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.
