Are Business Telephone Systems Going To Be Obsolete Soon?
-OR-
Just What Does Make a Telephone System Obsolete?

In this tutorial I'll address a question that people ask me at least once or twice a week; Should I wait to buy a phone system or; If I buy a phone system now will it be obsolete in a couple of years?

The simple and true answer is no, if you buy a new system now it won't be obsolete in a couple of years. OK, let's tell you why and make this as easy as we can!

Phone systems that were made back in the early 80's still aren't obsolete.... they're just worn out, that's all! They'll still do the job as long as you can get the parts and find someone who knows how to work on them. The older systems have more trouble with voicemail, but the fact is that they still work the same as they did before the "information revolution".

In order to change our way of communicating by voice, (which is still and will always be totally necessary for almost every business), we will, as a society need to abandon our system of dialing a telephone number in favor of using (dialing) an IP address. This is going to happen, to be sure, but it is certainly an incredible change that will take at least 15 years to happen nationwide.

You don't think so? In order for this change to happen we have to confirm that we can pass data to every business and home in this country, and integrate these new systems with the old telephone systems that are in countries throughout the rest of the world that can't afford to keep up with us.

Now, that's a tall order, even considering all of the great advances we've made technology wise in the last few years.

To put it in perspective, there are still folks in this country who are still on party lines, and at a minimum 25-40% of the actual cabling infrastructure that we are currently running our data on has some type of problem either on the telephone pole or in the underground cable. These cables as of right now have serious problems passing data at more than 28,000 baud, and Bell operating companies in the US, like Ameritech, PAC Bell, Bell Atlantic and so on only guarantee that you can get 19,000 baud at any given time.

The question is really-what would make my phone system obsolete? And the answer is actually pretty simple.

What feeds your system dial tone is what will someday make it obsolete. Until ALL of the data providers can provide reliable data services through phone lines or some type of cable, and until networks and the internet finally get some standards for delivery of data in place that will stay in place for more than a couple of years, your phone system is not going to become obsolete.

The data world is in it's infancy right now, folks. When it matures more, and it will take time, and it will happen, we will all make our calls and do all of our talking over the internet (or whatever we'll call it then!) Bottom line: Until the web, and it's means of delivery become more reliable, we'll just have to use what is reliable, our business telephone system.

I tried to keep this tutorial as brief as possible and still get the point across. I hope everyone caught what I was trying to present here and that we cleared up some of the fog on the obsolescence issue.

We've got seminars coming up in the following cities for all who might be interested; Los Angeles-March 16, 2001 New York- March 30, 2001 Chicago- April 6, 2001

We've added another section to our seminar on Wide Area Networking and Voice Over IP. It's actually really interesting stuff! If you are planning to attend, please visit http://tellearn.com/signup.html or call us at 800-509-3666.

Take care,
Chris Walsh
Instructor, Telephone System Learning Seminars, Inc.
www.tellearn.com
800-509-3666