Hi, my name is Mike Dazio and I am the CEO of ZT Technology Solutions (www.zttechsol.com). Our company, ZT, has been an industry leader since 2010 in assisting telephone companies as they struggle to support many of the legacy telecom products in their network. Currently many phone companies are faced with declining wireline revenues, retirement and loss of experienced engineers, increasing maintenance costs, and OEMs declaring End of Life for most legacy products.
ZT offers an alternative to the OEMs by providing Tier 3 level remote technical support and repair for most switching, transmission, voice mail, data, and IP legacy products (vendor products supported include Nortel, Nokia, Ericsson, Cisco and many others). We offer innovative pricing packages and services tailored to your requirements. Our goal is to reduce your total cost of supporting your legacy network. More importantly, we can help you with the migration to next generation/carrier grade IP based communication platforms, such as Metaswitch.
When I started ZT, our mission statement was to extend the life of legacy equipment and eliminate obsolescence. Our team of ex-Nortel Emergency Recovery engineers have been doing that successfully for the last 25 years. Our job is to help extend the life of your legacy equipment and help you in the migration to next generation technologies such as IP, NFV/SDN, 5G. Our objectives include educating you in how to best resolve complex issues, and since we are vendor agnostic, we can provide you with an unbiased solution catered to your specific financial and technology needs.
As part of ZT Technology Solutions, we have been providing our expertise in legacy switching systems (DMS, EWSD, DCO, 5ESS) to maintain the current network. It has become harder and harder due to the reduction of experienced telco personnel, unmanned sites, lack of office records, lack of spares, lack of documentation regarding OS systems (passwords, disk drives), and a general lack of preventative maintenance. Coupled with all the telco mergers and divestitures and mismanagement of the past 25 years, it’s obvious the legacy TDM network became the stepchild of the telco industry.
Since 2020 however, the legacy telco landscape has fundamentally changed, and that change has nothing to do with software or hardware. Some Telco companies in their drive to reduce costs, cut headcount, save floor space and power, have driven their core expertise (i.e., crafts people and technical support personnel) to early retirement or unemployment through “cost reductions”. The focus on investment has been primarily on 5G and Fiber, while legacy TDM services have been the proverbial “cash cow” generating cash to fund these new investments.
As these changes take hold, preservation of the legacy TDM assets is no longer the right solution as these systems are becoming unsupportable. For the reasons stated above, expertise is no longer available, and some hardware components are becoming even more difficult to find. The need to retire legacy TDM systems has become more urgent for the reasons stated above. We believe that NOW is the time to accelerate the migration to the next generation of products. In the past most Telcos slowly migrated off the legacy TDM. It will not run forever. Now is the time to consider accelerating your plans for migration.
We have recently completed two such migrations for medium sized Telcos, including migrating a legacy Voice Mail system for a Tier 2 Telephone company that had over 300,000 voice mailboxes to Metaswitch. We are currently working with a smaller company to migrate off their legacy DMS/5ESS network to a Metaswitch environment. As experienced personnel have become unavailable, we have provided on-site and remote support to accomplish trunk and subscriber migration, and all the essential central office work to accomplish this task. We are providing migration services that include complex translations including routing, lines, trunks and Centrex translations, in addition to remote support of the legacy equipment as it is being turned down ZT has established its reputation in supporting the legacy TDM equipment and we will continue to do so. We have the expertise and manpower, and we will support you and your team’s effort to migrate to the newer IP technologies.
Our extensive customer list includes AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Frontier Communications, Ziply, Consolidated Communications and many NTCA members such as Primelink, Northland, SRT,and Fusion.
Please look at our web site, specifically many of the talks I’ve given at the IEEE Communications, Quality and Reliability Workshop (CQR) which focus on legacy support, as well as an article I wrote entitled Death of the PSTN is Finally Here.
Please call or email us and we will provide you with a free assessment of your legacy support requirements and how best ZT can provide a customized solution. We can begin the discussion on how we can together extend the life of your current legacy telecom equipment as well as begin the migration to next generation technologies.
Thank you,
Mike Dazio
CEO ZT Technology Solutions (www.zttechsol.com)
Phone: 908 403-0610
Email: mdazio@zttechsol.com
