A survey by Adax Europe, an industry leader in high performance signaling infrastructure, reveals that nearly three quarters of telco vendors still believe that support for their SS7 infrastructure is essential to their long term business. 

According to the survey of telecommunication vendors based throughout Europe, despite operators migrating to IP networks at an astonishing rate, 72 percent of those surveyed still hadn’t phased out their SS7 infrastructure entirely and claimed that ongoing support was vital to business.

A closer look into the views of European vendors revealed that 74 percent believed it was very important that their infrastructure was compatible with both new and old technology. Operators are at different stages in their IP migration paths and this figure demonstrates how many vendors are still trying to squeeze as much as they can out of their existing signaling networks and investments before committing to the transition to an all IP infrastructure.

The survey also asked the question, what are the key product features which vendors put above others when looking at their telecommunications infrastructure?  67 percent explained that high performance and high link density was their largest priority when reviewing product features, followed by the number of trunks per board.

Robin Kent, Director, European Operations at Adax says, “The survey showed us that although the telco world will eventually become IP-networked this transition is not yet complete and many operators are still looking to support their SS7 infrastructure.  It is inevitable that one day most telecommunication infrastructures will be based upon IP systems but that is clearly still a way off.  Until then operators need to manage the transition as smoothly as possible and that is why Adax continues to invest in both SS7 and SIGTRAN (SS7 over IP) product developments”.