By: Jonathan Wagner

Communication is the cornerstone of human interaction. People want and need to be connected to each other, whether it’s chatting with their loved ones or calling up the local auto parts store to ask a question. Some studies have even shown that consumers and businesses alike prefer human-to-human voice interactions.

For communication service providers, meeting market demand requires the delivery of well-supported end-to-end voice communication systems. While some may believe voice is dying, London-based Omdia Research estimates the number of public switched telephone network (PSTN) subscribers to decline at a compounded annual rate of 14.5 percent from 2022 to 2028 — it’s still the most commonly used modality to communicate in business. In fact, the Federal Communications Commission put the number at 95 million — a combination of POTS (plain old telephone system) lines and VoIP connections, with 55 million of those comprised of business lines.

Voice is still a necessary part of the overall communications package for businesses and residences alike. However, legacy voice infrastructure is increasingly costly to operate and challenging to maintain. As Omdia indicates, employees with legacy voice engineering skills are aging out of the workforce at increasing rates. At the same time, servicing legacy infrastructure has become a greater and greater challenge with parts often hard to track down and some engineers turning to eBay to find what they need.

The cloud offers a lifeline for service providers to refresh their voice capabilities and consolidate disparate services and vendor technology onto a single platform, improving operational agility to meet the demands of the modern user. Utilizing cloud-based voice communications infrastructure provides a host of operational benefits for service providers that are looking to streamline and manage their end-to-end voice services. In recent industry conversations, five key areas of focus have emerged.

More Streamlined Management

First and foremost, migrating to the cloud can allow for the consolidation of services onto a single platform, making it easier to manage systems, deploy updates, and centralize control. Cloud communications platforms can also automate routine maintenance tasks such as software updates, provisioning, and scaling, significantly reducing the need for manual intervention. Similarly, software updates and maintenance are automatically distributed, which lowers total operating costs and the number of skilled employees businesses need to manage networks, allowing service providers to focus on the customer experience versus maintaining vendor software.

With the cloud, services are deployed centrally, which reduces resource strain, and creates uniformity across user interfaces, rendering service provider end-user utilization and consumption more efficient.

Mitigated Risk of Obsolescence

Second, a single cloud communications platform can help mitigate the risk of future obsolescence by providing continuous updates and upgrades, ensuring that the latest features and security enhancements are always in place. This proactive approach keeps the system current with evolving technologies and industry standards, reducing the need for frequent hardware replacements and extensive system overhauls. As voice systems increasingly reach end-of-life or become discontinued, vendor support and replacement parts will likely be discontinued. The cloud ensures that your products can continue to evolve with more seamless updates.

Additionally, since it’s not viable to build all your infrastructure at once, cloud-based infrastructure allows for ongoing integration with new tools and services, ensuring long-term agility and future proofing. Cloud platforms adapt and respond to change with ease in a way legacy platforms cannot compete with.

Path to Revenue Growth

Third, cloud communications are inherently scalable, ensuring that service providers can accommodate growth and changing business needs. Legacy solutions, on the other hand, have no hope of keeping pace with the demand for a fast, ever evolving, and positive user experience. They lack the capabilities to innovate and adapt to changing market conditions, putting service providers at risk. With a cloud-native platform, voice becomes an application on a broadband network, enabling service