Decades ago, legacy telecommunications companies first laid the foundation for the telecom industry using copper and coaxial cables. Although these systems have been upgraded — to varying degrees — over the years, today’s enterprise businesses demand a more sophisticated and reliable technology.
As your business looks to unlock your network’s performance potential, you may find that the key lies in the age of your service provider’s network infrastructure.
The History of Telecom Infrastructure
Decades ago, public and private funding established the United States as the first country to invest in telecom infrastructure at scale. These legacy networks, defined as those that utilize components that predate the advent of the World Wide Web (circa 1993), helped to shape daily life and became a critical component for effective communications. Whether users needed to make a business call or fax documents, we relied on this foundational telecom infrastructure for years.
Unfortunately, time has taken its toll. Due to a subsequent lack of continued investment and upgrades, the U.S. is facing outdated networks and an aging, crumbling legacy infrastructure. Plus, legacy network providers need to contend with implementing needed upgrades across the vast, physical geography of the U.S.
Legacy Networks Face A Patchwork Problem
As the telecom industry has evolved, so too has its complexity. Unfortunately, legacy networks also carry a history rich with accumulated asset fragments that have been patched together over time. Mergers and acquisitions over the course of decades resulted in provider consolidations that further compounded these issues, rendering some organizations unable to pinpoint exactly where their merged network assets are located.
In turn, this has created a host of obstacles. Notably:
- Age: A provider’s network is not a fine wine. A network built 30 years ago simply cannot support an enterprise’s technological needs today without a significant and intensive investment of capital and time.
- Equipment: A legacy network’s equipment may be two or three generations older than what is available on the market, and struggle to keep pace with demand. Moreover, to prevent signal degradation, some providers install additional equipment along the route to boost the signal, which can increase network latency.
- Efficiency: Over time, repairs and patches can increase the risk of packet loss. Compounded over a few decades, these modifications can disrupt efficient data transmission, resulting in errors or missing data. Effectively, data sent over a legacy network may take the best path of least — or most — resistance, instead of the path that was purpose-built for its transmission.
Because inherited assets often lack critical documentation such as route maps, network capacity and fiber strand-count per sheath, it makes updating these combined infrastructures even more complicated. And who suffers? The enterprise.
Enterprise organizations rely on their networks to manage business-critical applications, transfer information across multiple office locations and perform data storage and replication. They need service providers that can keep up — proactively enhancing their technology and networks to deliver optimal service levels. If a provider is unable to maintain its network due to a lack of information or unwilling to do so due to fractured and competing resources, enterprise organizations ultimately pay the price for their legacy network service providers’ inaction.
To learn more about what to look for from your network service provider, download “Greenfield vs. Legacy Telecom Infrastructure: The Pitfalls of Connecting with a Network Provider in Maintenance Mode.”