How we built it: PSTN migration for a government body | IoT Insider Podcast Episode 27

Dan Cunliffe
Hi, everyone, and thanks so much for tuning into the IoT Insider, I’m Dan Cunliffe, Managing Director of Pangea. And today I am once again thrilled to be joined by my good friend and Sales Director, Bernie McPhillips. Hi there, Bernie.

Bernie McPhillips
Hey, Dan, how you doing? Great to be back on the podcast this month, really looking forward to it.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, thanks for joining us, you’re the busiest man in the IoT space, but we tracked him down to join us for what I hope is going to be a very fascinating and quite topical podcast today, because we’ll be looking at how we helped a UK government body, get ahead of the PSTN switch off, particularly trying to keep 4,500 street furniture endpoints back online. And the point of this one for the listeners is really about trying to show you how you can attack the PSTN changes that are coming up, whether it’s big, whether it’s small, whether it’s complex or simple. Our partners are able to use the way that Pangea works to kind of enable that. And I think, Bernie, maybe we begin with sort of ironing out a little bit about what is the PSTN switch off? What does it mean? It’s quite topical, a lot of companies talking about it. But do you want to maybe have a crack at just high level explaining what it’s all about?

Bernie McPhillips
I’ll certainly have a go Dan. So my understanding the PSTN, that stands for the Public Switched Telephone Network. And it effectively it’s a very old analogue network that actually dates back to the 19th century. So I remember from my history lessons in school, that actually means the 1800s. So when you think of the technologies that we’re now trying to deploy in a current times, the high data bandwidth applications, everything’s mobile, everything’s on the move, everything’s about data. Being able to connect to the things that are important to you, both personally and professionally. So effectively we, I think, as a nation, we’ve outgrown this old analogue network, and there’s now a need to switch to a fully digital network, which will mean higher speeds, everything’s over IP so Internet Protocol, including calls rather than that traditional copper network. That you know currently we see hanging overhead, telephone lines strung across streets, whole web of copper cables that are buried beneath your feet I don’t know, if you ever go past like a street corner, and there’s an engineer out and he’s lifted the, the kind of the manhole cover, and he’s under there doing things, it just looks like it’s just a myriad of cables. And you think of these copper cables literally just buried beneath our feet everywhere we walk, and they’ve been under there for hundreds of years. So essentially, we need to move to modern day technology, the PSTN network is just completely out of kilter with the demands of modern technology, modern communications, so everything needs to switch to mobile and Internet communications.

Dan Cunliffe
Very good. I take that. I’d probably say that, you know, first for someone who’s going like what is this about? Which, if you’re in the telecoms sort of world would be a bit of a surprise. But if you haven’t heard of it yet, you know, think of it also as when we had to change televisions, to a more digital style of television, it’s, it’s Countrywide, you cannot really use analogue sort of TVs anymore, because they won’t accept that type of, I suppose frequency, or how you want to think about it. So we all had to upgrade our TVs right? We had to change the way we were going to view things going forward. And this is pretty much in line with it, we have to make a pretty radical change. And in order to kind of keep supplying customers with the right services, you have to make these changes. And so we’re gonna get into what I am very proud to say is probably one of the biggest case studies that we’ve achieved with, obviously, with one of our partners, in a market, which we can describe as probably one of the largest cities in the UK, if not Europe, where we supported our partner in winning the government change over of PS Legacy PSTN lines into a bit more mobile focused solution. And we particularly talk about this because if you imagine, this is all about swapping over street furniture, in a large city, where usually the transport is managed by a sort of central body, and yet they have the same problems, which is hey, you know what all these PSTN is changing? What are we going to do about it going forward? Street furniture is not necessarily the things you sit on when you have a drink. It’s actually more related to things like the streetlights, the little grey cabinets, you might see. Traffic lights, maybe even certain things where we’ve got EV charges. The body might manage anything related to transport. And as Bernie said, you know, it’s extreme likelihood that legacy wise those I suppose devices, street furnitures, we’re kind of clumping them together, were managed by an older PSTN line, because all they wanted to do was measure telemetry on it. Is it on? Is it off? Is there a problem with it, you know, sort of traditional, I guess, IoT type scenario. But now, the point of this was actually there was a real need to move away from PSTN because number one of the switch off as Bernie, so articulately mentioned earlier, but now they’ve also got this problem of well, what am I going to do going future? Like, should I consider another type of fixed connectivity? Or should I consider a wireless connectivity? Bernie was very involved with us, with our partner and our wonderful Account Manager, Pamela Carrigan, maybe you want to share a little bit about why they decided to go down the route of Pangea.

Bernie McPhillips
Yeah, absolutely Dan, thank you. I suppose that one of the first things that was needed answering was why now? Because the date’s been very well published, the PSTN network is being switched off by the end of 2025. With the key word in that sentence is by not in. It’s not in 2025, the process actually completes in 2025. And it’s well underway. There’s lots of exchanges already being deemed end of life with no new connections, no in life changes, and many more exchanges that are scheduled, pretty much on a daily basis. So the process is well underway. So 2025 feels years away. So why were we even talking about it in 2021? Effectively, this particular body saw that they really needed to start to plan and then move early, because there was a lot to do. So it’s not just about phone lines, there’s all of these other things that you’ve mentioned that connected to this ageing PSTN network, and that’s things like door entry systems, alarms, security barriers, elevators, and the things that you’ve mentioned that were in scope for this particular project, everything that you would see when going in and around a street centre, emergency signage, streetlights, traffic lights, etc. So this particular body was ready to embrace an all digital model. And there’s lots of reasons to go early. As I’ve already mentioned, there can be lots to do, lots of planning. But actually, there can be lower costs when moving to an IP infrastructure as well and away from an analogue form of network. So you’re able to accelerate those savings and go digital, as soon as you can. There’s no need to wait until the last moment, the great thing was this particular government body was prepared to do that really early. There’s lots of things connected, like I said, lots of grey boxes, lots of grey cabinets, lots of street lights, traffic lights, basically controlling the infrastructure of the whole city currently connected on this network, that’s going to be turned off within the next two and a half years. So moving to a Pangea service, a cellular service was easy to deploy, there was no digging up of roads, there’s no planning permission. There’s no road closures having to divert traffic in one of the biggest cities in the UK, if not Europe, and maybe the world that the logistics of that would have been practically impossible. So to be able to do this in a much less invasive way, and using cellular, was absolutely deemed the way to go. And then Pangea was selected to deliver the solution in collaboration with our partner, because we can deliver truly managed unsteered Multi-network connectivity. So wherever these services will be deployed, right across this city that currently occupied by millions of people, no single network has perfect coverage. So we deploy a Multi-network service right across the solution that would allow all of those devices to connect based on signal strength and its location. Because it’s a fully managed service and the investments we’ve made in our own infrastructure and our core network, we’ve also got full control over the IP. So all of this could be on a private APN with private static IP, totally secure, only accessible by the people that need to access it. So it’s now turning into a truly managed service for this particular client. And all of these services are managed through a Pangea portal, so the usage can be monitored if a device starts to act out of its normal behaviour, that can be intervened. We can diagnose, we can dial in remotely, we can do so many things that you would be unable to do with a standard mobile broadband package. And we’ve now rolled out close to 5,000 sites in this particular city. And there’s another 10,000, that’s going to be getting rolled out in the next 12 months as well. So I think just, moving into that all digital service, beyond phone systems, beyond calls, just being able to make everything digital future proof. I don’t think there’s going to be an instance in the future where somebody comes along and says we’re going to switch off the mobile network. The term LTE has been around for a long time, right Dan, long term evolution. That’s the plan with mobile, its long term and it will continue to evolve and we’ve seen that, we’ve seen 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, there’s already 6G and 7G labs set up all around the world so I don’t think there will ever be a point where they’re gonna switch off all of the mobile network, it will just continue to evolve, become higher bandwidth, higher speeds, more secure, just be able to do more with it as opposed to ever getting switched off at some point in the future. So we’re all really proud of that one aren’t we, what an incredible project.

Dan Cunliffe
I think you’ve touched on so many important points. And I think for those of you listening like Well, that’s pretty intense. Actually, there’s just sort of one or two or three really important parts. Number one, it’s more scalable, because like Bernie said, you can actually reach your timelines quicker, because you’re not invasive in the way you’re delivering through cellular. It’s highly, more reliable, because you’re actually putting multiple networks on one service, where in the past, you may have heard something from someone like a Cable and Wireless, or a Virgin or TalkTalk, whoever provided a broadband network would have been sort of that type of service. Here, we’re saying the endpoint has multiple networks available to it, which is not achievable before, right? Definitely not at this price point. And then I was gonna say the level of security, we can custom support the Wide Area Network infrastructure. We can create levels of access so that people can manage the estate from one place. So it really comes down to being, you know, way more reliable, way more scalable, way more secure. Like it’s just simple in terms of how that was delivered.

Bernie McPhillips
Resilience is key. Multi network, if there’s local network outage, anything like that at all, the service can pick up another network. The broadband outages cost the UK economy £5 billion last year. Do you think if the impact of an outage in this particular city, the infrastructure control and traffic, traffic lights, and street signs, everything else, if there’s an outage, and those things are no longer performing as they’re meant to, the chaos that would ensue is almost unfathomable. So be able to have that resilience, that always on these are really critical services. And they need to be delivered with the connectivity with the resilience to match. There’s a really good point that you make about the Multi-network element.

Dan Cunliffe
And you know, just to sort of take the listeners on a bit of a further journey, like obviously, besides, you know, Pamela and Bernie doing an exceptional job with our partner, and obviously them trusting us to deliver this type of service with them. There is the other side of it too which says, you know what, like, actually, we got so involved that we supported them further than just the connectivity, we got really involved with saying, look, there are probably better ideas around antennas, there’s probably better ideas around creating what was, and I kind of chuckled to myself about this because I remember looking at the spec of these antennas, and they kind of came back saying, Oh, they are less vandalise-able, that’s not a word, but I’m making it up as I go. Because they were slightly more covert, if you think about it, so these antennas have a kind of way in which they look less conspicuous for the people walking by.

Bernie McPhillips
If you think about it, we’re connecting a metal box. So there’s a device inside the metal box that needs to receive a cellular signal, that’s pretty tough to do. And if you just put what you would typically think of as an antenna, that’s normally an aerial pointing straight up in the air, if you put that on a cabinet on a street corner, with people walking by. Now I’m a positive thinking person and I like to think best of the general public, someone’s just gonna snap that off or bend it, or do something at some point, right? So we managed to find and deliver the right antenna for this particular solution. So I think of it almost like a hockey puck. Yeah, it’s more of a disk. Really a kind of top end, high grade, great antenna, but it is so discreet, and it’s fitted to the side of the cabinet and ensures that the signal on the outside gets inside. But it’s barely noticeable. So way less likely to be damaged accidentally, of course.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, I kind of raised that on purpose, because I think a lot of the times when you consider these type of deployments, particularly with PSTN switch off a lot of guys are going, Oh, but you know, how am I gonna get signal to this particular place or that particular place? It’s a bit of a myth sometimes, you know, you can have antennas that will run from a specific area to another, you can get that done. In this scenario, it works so well, because of the fact that we were able to source the right things and get it done, you know, so there are a lot of ways in which you can make it happen. And you know what, guys? We’ve been talking about this for almost 15 minutes, right? But we’ve not mentioned price yet. Like we’ve not mentioned the value that we’re able to deliver in this project. If anyone is listening to this and is thinking oh, well, why didn’t they go for a technology like SOGEA, or maybe Fibre To The Cabinet or go down that route? Actually, one of the decision making points was the value created here besides all the other very important points we mentioned around resilience, management, security. Is that actually, from a price perspective, this is a far better solution commercially effective way to deliver this case study or to deliver this project because we were able to view this as a kind of low to medium data requirement, which is completely correctly spec’d in this way, but would be completely over spec’d if you put a Fibre To The Cabinet or a SOGEA service in. Now, I think the point I’m trying to get to is that there are tools available that Pangea will be introducing quite soon to help many, many of our partners understand where your deployments and where your PSTN switch of plan fits down the road. Is it a low to medium data requirement? Yes, this is the better product to use, because number one, it’s more resilient, you’re able to manage it very, very well, potentially more secure should you choose that, but also, a very important criteria, it fit’s the price point you need, in order to not have to use a SOGEA service, or an FTTP service, which I think is, you know, quite vital in making these decisions, as well.

Bernie McPhillips
It certainly is Dan, you know, one size doesn’t fit all. And whether there’s going to be a lot of the PSTN switch off that very well can and could be addressable with SOGEA, or a full fibre solution. But certainly not all of it, and maybe not even half of it. It’s either commercially or logistically impossible to address all of those opportunities, especially when we talk about the things we already mentioned today. Door entry systems, security barriers, CCTV cameras, emergency pull cords, elevators, you can’t run fibre to all of these things. But they’re currently connected on a PSTN network and an alternative has to be in place within the next two and a half years. And we’re now seeing an acceleration and adoption and a real desire to move early because there’s lots of planning. You don’t want to be doing this last minute. And also, very impressively, as we’ve already said, there are many occasions when there could be cost savings as a result of doing this move into a digital service, a more intelligent service today. So why wait until 2025 to realise those cost savings when they can be realised today and benefit from them for the next two and a half years. That really is a real opportunity. And I think that’s what our resellers, that’s what the channel have been phenomenal at for decades. Looking at what’s happening, these seismic shifts in our industry, whether it was the proliferation of smartphones, mobile data, mobile email, 3G, 4G, 5G, the channel is phenomenal at seeing those things as opportunity and innovating. And we are the trusted advisors to customers and not just small customers, local customers that our partners sell to, large governing bodies, Premier League football clubs, massive High Street retailers, global airlines. These are all organisations and businesses that are using Pangea services today, look at the value of the deal. You said we didn’t want to look about price, but it definitely came with a budget for the governing body, save them money over time. But the value of the contract the first 4,500 services that have gone live, the contract on that is £2.8 million to the partner. There’s another 10,000 to go. The contract value on the full 14,500 sites is £9 million. And these deals are being won by our partners, supported by Pangea. So I don’t know how many times we need to bust those myths. “There’s no money in IoT”, “the opportunity’s not real.” £9 million, governing bodies, lighten up whole cities with their infrastructure to make sure that everything runs seamlessly is being run by Pangea with a partner. And that’s why we urge our other partners to engage, we can run audits across their PSTN base, we can talk to them about the product, the Pangea products that will match all of the different use cases, because we’ve got everything from kilobytes, megabytes through to terabytes, or even unlimited data, fully managed static IPs, Multi-network. And we don’t have to even bind this to the UK, having looked into the PSTN switch off quite a lot, because it’s a big thing for us. It’s a monumental shift in the industry. It’s not just happening here. The switch to digital is happening everywhere. And it’s happening fast. Germany, Japan, and Sweden are way ahead of us, and Estonia and Netherlands are already done. They’ve done it. They’ve switched off their PSTN networks already. So Pangea have access to 960 networks in 185 countries. So we don’t have to just limit these opportunities and what we’re capable of to the UK. We could do it anywhere around the world. And I don’t think there’s, you said right at the very beginning. I don’t think there’s going to be many other case studies anywhere near the significance of this 14 and a half thousand sites, £9 million pound contract, so we just want to help our partners win more and more contracts like this.

Dan Cunliffe
Well said, and that’s why he’s our Sales Director, ladies and gentlemen, because he knows where this stuff is going. I think you touched on a very important point sort of, in sort of closing on this one, you know, I do hope that those who are partners and are listening and those who are not partners who are listening are thinking about, well actually there is a segment or more where we can be very, very disruptive and supportive for you in making the decision to the get started with the PSTN switch off. I will plug it a little bit, we will be talking about our PSTN related webinar, which is coming up in a good couple of weeks. I think probably near the end of June, beginning of July around about that time, we will be talking about more. But the point of that is, we will be talking with everybody about how we can enable your company in order to attack and create a very, very robust plan on what you do, as exchangers move into what they call stop sell. So they stopped selling certain services. And eventually they start to turn off certain services. What are you going to do with your customers who are looking to sign new three year contracts with you today? But you’ve only offered them a PSTN related product? You’ve got to think about that you can’t actually do that, it’s not going to be supported, how do you deal with it? And we’ve got a very simple step by step model, which begins with us helping to audit your PSTN base practically offer you the right products that can serve as certain parts of your estate. And then you too, can reap the benefits, like we’ve done with this government body and supporting that customer in achieving a total contract value of near £9 million. If you’re listening, and you’re like how do I get a part of this, please do contact us we’ve got contact forms through our website, you’re able to contact us through LinkedIn, through the Pangea page. As well as being able to try and contact Bernie or myself directly. We don’t you don’t mind, we’ll definitely be there to help. Any more closing thoughts from you Bernie, anything else you want to add?

Bernie McPhillips
I don’t think so Dan. I think we’ve covered it all, I think we’ve been fairly comprehensive, but don’t see this as risk, you know, a lot of you will be the providers of PSTN services today. So you might be sat with your head in your hands thinking all this poses is risk when these services get turned off. That’s less revenue, less margin for you, you’re losing these customers, you might have a single plan of attack to try and replace a lot of those services with SOGEA and fibre. And that will certainly help okay, we’re not going to beat around the bush, that will help. There’s going to be a lot of these services that are going to be addressable with those technologies. But most definitely not all of them and not even close. So we generally think by adopting a cellular approach, a managed intelligent mobile data approach for the PSTN switch off, will open up more of the opportunity to you, you’ll definitely be able to address some of it with your more standard telecoms products. But not all of it. It’s about having this in your armoury as well, it just represents an even more significant opportunity, your customers will love you for it, because you’re taking them on that journey, advising them on the right solution, the right technology to move to, and especially engaging them early. We’re talking about the PSTN switch off, because we’re in this industry, we read all of the industry press, we go to all of the industry events, we follow certain forms of social media, etc. We live and breathe this stuff, our customers don’t, they’re not in telecoms, they’re legal firms, they’re painters and decorators, they’re car showrooms, they don’t read the press that we do, they don’t absorb the information that we do. So we have to engage them, we have to take them on this journey. And by having a full kit bag to be able to go and speak to your customers about, SOGEA, fibre, and intelligent mobile data, you’ll be able to offer every single one of your customers absolutely the right solution. So don’t see this as risk, see this as opportunity. But engage now, don’t wait till 2025, it feels like a long way off. But the switch off has already begun. And it’s a tidal wave, it’s not going to stop, it’s not going to slow down. So engage now and allow us to support you in speaking to your customers about these solutions.

Dan Cunliffe
Thanks, buddy. Very, very wise words there. Cool we’re gonna kind of bring it to that. Lots more activity about this, big changes sort of happening across the UK and also you know, other parts of Europe and further around the world. How can we support and allow you to gain access to those changes? Just to touch on that as a kind of reminder, you know, almost 88% of the UK’s PSTN lines are actually managed by the big four providers. So there’s a great opportunity to do something where you can take a slice of that, as a Telecoms Reseller, or an ISP, or Managed Service Provider with Pangea, definitely open up there. We’ll leave you with that. Thanks so much Bernie for joining us. I really appreciate your time. For those listening to us, as I mentioned, do head over to our website for more IoT podcast and blog content, and for real life examples of how IoT looks in action, how intelligent mobile data is being used in real life scenarios where we are able to talk about exciting case studies like this one. Thanks so much for your time. I’m Dan Cunliffe, Managing Director of Pangea. We’ll see you next time.