“A Bold statement I know but, if we get it right, there are such compelling reasons to follow this router for the SME that no one else stands a chance. The cost savings are immense, the simplicity of subscription based services is significant and the concept of paying as you go/grow is very attractive to the Small to Medium Enterprise. So, why are we not seeing mountains of case studies and awards for IP Centrex deployments?
I challenge any IP Centrex provider to issue a case study which has been deployed successfully over the public network i.e. Internet and this is the big issue. Unless the provider hosts his platform within the ISP's infrastructure, any user of the service will be dictated to by the weakest link in the chain. If one hop on the journey between the customer premises and the platform performs badly, the quality of the service will suffer significantly and the net effect is poor voice quality and unhappy customers.
If IP Centrex is to succeed, the ISP's need to start offering services based on their own infrastructure and only their own infrastructure. Using a customers’ existing Internet connectivity just does not cut it and is, in effect, a false economy.
Of course, there are many other elements involved in a successful IP Centrex deployment but if we get the basics right, the future looks bright for us all.