tecwork Telecoms Sector and Marketplace overview September 2022
Good afternoon. Nick Brandon here from tecwork. Today, I'm just going to give you an overview of the telecommunications marketplace as I see it in September 2022. This replaces a rather older video we did back in 2019. So, things have changed a lot even since then, so we thought we'd better do a new video.
So what's the telecoms market like in 2022? Well, I've been doing this since about 1994, 1996. When I started, it was quite a simple marketplace. There were a dozen or so vendors and they had different ranges of phone systems. They were connected to analog lines or ISDN connections, which are digital connections, and it was quite straightforward. You'd have a control unit from somebody like Panasonic or AVAYA in your premises, then there'd be hard wired phone extensions sometimes using your structure cabling or data cabling. But back in the day, a log was wide with telephony cabling, and it was quite straightforward. You could walk into someone's office and see that they had a Panasonic phone on their desk. You knew there was a Panasonic phone system somewhere in the building.
These days, that's not the case. There are hundreds, if not thousands of niche players. It's very difficult to know what phone system people have got from looking at the handset in their office. A lot of suppliers have created their own VoIP-based phone systems, VoIP being VoIP over IP, which basically means it's telecoms using a data network, which in most instances basically means it's either the data network in your building with your computers being connected to the same kind of network, or it's across the internet. And nowadays, a lot of people are using VoIP systems rather than the old digital systems because digital and analog lines are going to be supposedly turned off in 2025. So for the last 10 years, VoIP has been a thing basically.
What we are now seeing is there are a huge number of players in the marketplace as I said. There are still some big players there. You've still got the likes of Mitel and AVAYA who have been fantastically successful selling their premises-based phone systems for the last 20 years or so. They tend to be being upgraded, certainly we're upgrading them when we find them and when we have customers that still have them. We are upgrading them to cloud based phone systems, which use VoIP. And most of the time we are using 3CX software-based product, which sits on a server in the cloud, normally in Amazon Web Services. So it's a cloud-based system, it just means that all the users can connect to that cloud-based system regardless of the device and regardless of their location.
So they can work from their phone wherever they are, whatever device they're on, smartphone, PC, Mac, wherever they're in Timbuktu or London or Australia or in their car, on the train, whatever, they can work from their phone. There are still big players out there. There are people like BT that have a cloud-based offering called BT Cloud Voice, which I believe is a Ring Central phone system, which has been sort of taken by BT, made to look like it's a BT phone system. That's about all I know about that.
AVAYA and Mitel still do sell their premises-based phone systems. I think predominantly more to larger enterprise type companies over sort of 250 users. And they have recently, in quite recent times, both launched a cloud-based offering, which you have to kind of buy from them, which we decided wasn't for us because we want to own our customers, so we didn't really want AVAYA and Mitel billing our customers for the phone systems. So we like to have a single contact for our customers, which is us with a single monthly bill from us with all of their services on it, whether that be telecoms, internet, mobile, IT services and support, et cetera, just one bill.
Please watch the video to get the rest of our overview.
So, that's our overview really. It's quite a complex marketplace now. You never really know what suppliers are out there. There's hundreds or thousands of suppliers now. The benefit of dealing with us is that we have a lot of experience. I've been doing this a long time, as I said. So if you want any questions answered with regards to telephony, internet, all the cabling that's involved in telephony, using smart phone apps and SOFTPHONE apps, support, migrating numbers, call recording, contact center products, remote working, anything like that, please get in touch with us at tecwork.co.uk, give us a call, 01892 578666, or email us at helpme@tecwork.co.uk. Thank you very much for listening. Have a good day.
3 окт 2024
