Communications service providers (CSPs) worldwide are in a race to significantly enhance their service agility and lower their operating expenses (OPEX). Consolidation and elimination of legacy voice and data networks, while retaining the revenues and subscribers, is an important step in this transformation journey.
Almost all large-scale transformation programs have faced significant challenges in sunsetting the long tail of legacy service. In this white paper our focus is on specific challenges related to this long tail or the last 2 percent challenge, and on the approaches (successful or otherwise) to be considered to meet these challenges. Our analysis indicates that more than half of the challenges are local or regional in nature. They fall in four broad categories: terminals, control, application and regulatory or legal. We define and provide real-world examples of these categories and then discuss how the industry is approaching these challenges. Three high-level approaches being used are technical migration, commercial migration and elimination.
We will discuss real applications of these approaches and the success of them depending on financial, operational and customer considerations.
Clearly, migration and eventual retirement of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and other legacy networks is complex and challenging. What took decades to build and then became a symbol of social and economic growth of nations needs a careful and deliberate transition.
However, at the cusp of a second digital transformation, the technologies based on a new Internet Protocol (IP) have universal acceptance and are fully capable of providing equivalent or even superior capabilities. In this white paper we are sharing insights based on industry best practices on the last of the long tail of legacy capabilities — the last 2 percent challenge — and the evolving best practices to enable complete retirement of the legacy technology.