Kordia Blog

Murray Goodman: As I have mentioned before, Kordia is embracing the benefits of convergence with our internal WAN, voice, video and internet all provided over our commercially available OnKor platform.

I have already spoken about the benefits of this and the associated company and employee productivity gains obtained through convergence, presence and collaboration tools.

While the underlying network technology has enabled the delivery of these next generation applications, this has exposed the fact that some of the Telco architecture and commercial models have not kept pace with this change. 

Traditionally, customers had a PBX at each site and were connected to the Telco network via an ISDN primary rate access at each site. This local switching architecture meant that local calls were kept local and only national calls were charged a toll rate. Seems logical right? 

In the world of Microsoft Lync and Cisco Call Manager for example, the PBX is software based and could be hosted at a central location, (like all your other major applications) with the customer WAN providing calling connectivity to the branch offices.

I know some of these implementations are distributed, but I wonder how much of this is as a result of the Telco charging model rather than the optimal solution from the customer’s viewpoint?

The problem with the centralised model for your voice application is that calls within a region, other than where you PBX is hosted, are now charged at a national toll rate because you no longer have local PSTN switching at every site.

I guess there are two ways to look at this. You might be in the camp that says the current Telco model is outdated and has not kept pace with convergence or the rapid adoption of cloud based models. Or, you might say that this hosted model is demanding  an unfair pricing model on the Telcos. 

It’s hard to find a win-win here. On one hand, the centrally hosted model provides significant cost savings to the customer, but on the other hand this seems to come at the expectation the Telco will play ball and adjust their charging model to allow it.