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.