On Tue, 11 May 2010, Alastair Johnson wrote:
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.
Some telcos are starting to kill off legacy services as they reach the end of their life cycle. I saw an application from Verizon in West Virginia to modify their tariff to remove SMDS as a service. According to the filing, no customers were using it and vendor support for it was coming to an end. I'm assuming at some point that Verizon stopped selling the service and quietly told any remaining customers that they needed to transition to other services because SMDS would be turned off on a certain date. I've heard of some LECs starting to mull dropping frame relay as a supported service as well... jms