An Intellyx BrainBlog for Globalgig.
Who will mourn the loss of the dial tone? Just a few years ago, it was comforting to think that even if the power went out in your building, that familiar humming sound would still be there.
Now, as telcos and equipment vendors are deprecating traditional voice services, it’s time to consider how dependent our businesses still are on voice.
To solidify business connectivity, companies invested in tandem switches for long distance calls and sophisticated PBX exchanges, so voice calls and faxes coming over the wires could be held, merged or patched to the right extension. Many of them are still humming away in a closet, or a corner of a server room somewhere, routing voice calls to call centers, conference rooms and far-flung extensions.
But time is running out, as the people who built and maintained the physical circuits of those legacy PBX systems have likely moved on, and major telcos are quietly sunsetting support for copper POTS (plain old telephone system) lines to focus on fiber, wireless and satellites.
We’ll need to untangle the wires in our communications systems and software to migrate toward a VoIP future and beyond.
Before we lose our voice in this transition, now is the time to explore how we can pick up our voice where the dial tone ends.
Supporting Voice as a Critical Business Channel
Enterprises must consider live conversations and communications essential to supporting and growing a customer base.
Despite the fact that every business is now a digital enterprise, most customers still believe that a phone call is the quickest way to solve a problem, get a real answer or make a change to an essential business service.
Even in this online age, that’s not changing. According to a recent McKinsey survey, 71% of Gen Z respondents said they are likely to make a voice call to get customer support.
At the end of every single unsuccessful help desk email session or AI chatbot experience, there should be a customer phone number to call. If there’s a dropped connection, or a frustrating interactive voice response (IVR) on the other end of the call, with an indefinite hold message that reminds the listener they can log in to your website, well, that’s the reason they called in the first place!
The fundamental quality-of-service criteria that have always applied to voice calls matter even more in a digital-first world:
- Faster call reception times and quicker handoffs
- Faultless connectivity with no hiccups or interruptions
- High-quality audio signal for better two-way comprehension
- Super-low latency and high responsiveness
Nobody will like talking to a human customer service rep, much less an AI agent, if there are misunderstandings and long hitches in the conversation. But perhaps more important than quality of service is the sustainability of voice services.
As carriers stop taking orders for wired lines and exit their copper facilities for fiber and VoIP, the voice network and equipment technologies voice services depended on are no longer supported from a software or hardware perspective. Support costs will rise, and the introduction of new conversational AI agents that can dial numbers and talk like humans will present a huge security risk to the voice channel.
Connecting Voice for a Globally Networked Future
Fortunately, we can transition wired analog and digital signals flowing through the PBX into something digestible to modern networks using SIP (session initiation protocol), which allows users and applications to dial any wired or mobile phone number over the internet.
Transforming a voice signal into a digital audio stream that could be received anywhere in the world became the baseline for later advances in video and real-time data streaming, and the global internet is ready to support this transformation today and into the future.
But no matter how rich today’s online media becomes, the voice remains a critical business channel, whether we dial a number manually with our fingers or automatically through an application.
Globalgig has figured out a way to pick up voice where the dial tone leaves off. Its fully managed and hosted digital PBX platform can overlay or fully replace legacy infrastructure, using SIP trunking to turn voice signals into IP packets in the nearest local point-of-presence on the company’s global network footprint for low latency and high quality.
Integrating Voice Capabilities to Unify Communications
As telcos drastically raise support prices and eventually phase out wired business lines, companies that have been around for a while are not even aware of the voice technical debt they are already paying annuities on.
“We'll go out and do a site survey, and identify all the telephone numbers that come into the headquarters, and we document and find the craziest things… The fax line is sharing the same POTS line as their fire alarm line. They have no idea what their voice inventory is out there, because they've just paid the bill and never questioned it for 30 years,” says Jeremy McPherson, SVP of Operations and Engineering at Globalgig.
“Their PBX is in the same situation. Sure, it’s always worked, but now, you’re not going to be able to get card replacements, and nobody’s maintaining the software for certain PBX loads. And there are huge security concerns, as the fraudsters that hack these systems have more sophisticated tools and get smarter every day,” McPherson continued.
Companies have already invested heavily in their legacy PBX and voice lines, which can cause some hesitancy for change. But change we must, if we want to capitalize on the value of voice as an essential business channel.
For instance, a nationwide brand gained the ability for a customer service call to the company’s main toll-free line to be routed to the right local branch office or retail store for each inquiry, then recorded or monitored, so a manager can jump in if there’s an intervention needed. All call operations are tied in with the customer’s profile and preferences within CRM and order management systems.
As another example, consider a utility company that maintains direct voice connection with field workers, paired with a speech-to-text AI that converts the voice audio as a confirmation of task completion at the home office. Managers and workers can patch voice calls and record messages between identities on the company’s Microsoft Teams instance, as well as regular phone numbers when needed.
To modernize voice for a globally networked future, we need not only to digitize voice as a secure data stream over the internet but to digitalize our voice capability as a first-class citizen of the modern application estate, in order to support the company’s unified communication and collaboration goals.
The Intellyx Take
While we operate our businesses in a digital-first, internet-based, globally networked world of applications and devices, if there’s one piece of advice I can offer, it’s not to treat voice as an afterthought to modernization efforts.
In many ways, our departing POTS was an unprecedented technological feat.
The first nationwide — and later, global — communications network was made of millions of miles of mostly hand-laid copper wire that was always on and powered enough to carry our voices almost anywhere.
The good old desk phone was one of the most revolutionary business tools ever known. Whether taking orders from customers, calling vendors and field reps, or talking on a conference line, our voices supplied the data to power the first real-time network.
When the dial tone ends and the copper goes quiet, the voice is not going away, whether it is carried over fiber lines, 5G networks or LEO (low Earth orbit) satellites.
If you fail to respond to the concerns of voice and drop the call, maintenance costs will balloon, operations will suffer, and your customers who depend on voice will certainly look for a better alternative at the first opportunity.
Talk is cheap — but not talking? That could get real expensive, real soon.
Author
Jason English - Director & Principal Analyst, Intellyx
Jason “JE” English is a Director and Principal Analyst, and CMO at Intellyx. Drawing on expertise in designing, marketing and selling enterprise software and services, he is focused on covering how agile collaboration between customers, partners and employees accelerates innovation. JE has broad experience advising and working for companies offering cloud computing platforms, blockchain networks, SaaS-based solutions, industry-specific marketing tools, supply chain management and gaming. A writer, documentarian, and community builder, JE has written, hosted and edited hundreds of technical news, education and thought leadership blogs, event sessions, podcasts and videos.
©2026 Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is editorially responsible for this document. At the time of writing, Globalgig is an Intellyx customer. AI was not used to write a single word of this content. Image source: Adobe Express.