The legacy of telecoms

Legacy networks are composed of multiple technologies, each of these supporting an individual service or application – such as SMS, voice and billing. Designated technical and engineering teams were responsible for each separate technology and service, which led to a ‘silo’ model for the provision and support of individual services. Legacy networks initially relied heavily on circuit switching and over time evolved to packet IP switching. However, this evolution did not occur at once – with some portions of the network making the transition to IP faster than others, this has resulted in the rise of hybrid networks. Some operators, for economic, business or technical reasons, are not yet ready to transition away from their legacy technologies. These factors mean that carriers are forced to cope with multiple network topologies and their associated underlying legacy technologies.

From a customers’ perspective, quality expectations have been somewhat mixed for legacy environments. For fixed networks, the expectations were relatively high since the operator could guarantee the delivery of the service or application over a network with adequate resources. However, mobile was a different case. Because of limitations to geographical coverage and bandwidth, many customers were often left with a bad experience. This has changed considerably as mobile networks have evolved from 2G to 3G to 3.5G to the point today where most customers now expect the same level of experience for mobile as they do for fixed.

If this abstract has piqued your interest, read the full article online in the August issue of Electronic Specifier Design, by clicking here.