Last month the FCC recommended that carriers adopt a number of security measures to help block against hacking in the SS7 Signaling System 7). Anybody with telephone network experience is familiar with the SS7 network. It has provided a second communication path that has been used to improve call routing and to implement the various calling features such as caller ID.

Last year it became public that the SS7 network has some serious vulnerabilities. In Germany hackers were able to use the SS7 network to connect to and empty bank accounts. Those specific flaws have been addressed, but security experts look at the old technology and realize that it’s open to attack in numerous ways.

It’s interesting to see the FCC make this recommendation because there was a time when it looked like SS7 would be retired and replaced. I remember reading articles over a decade ago that forecast the pending end of SS7. At that time everybody thought that our legacy telephone network was going to be quickly migrated to all-IP network and that older technologies like SS7 and TDM would retired from the telecom network.

This big push to convert to an IP voice network was referred by the FCC as the IP transition. The original goal of the transition was to replace the nationwide networks that connect voice providers. This nationwide network is referred to as the interconnection network and every telco, CLEC and cable company that is in the voice business is connected to it.

But somewhere along the line AT&T and Verizon high-jacked the IP transition. All of a sudden the transition was talking about converting last-mile TDM networks to digital. Verizon and AT&T want to tear down rural copper and largely replace it with cellular. This was not the intention of the original FCC plans. The agency wanted to require an orderly transition of the interconnection network, not the last-mile customer network. The idea was to design a new network that would better support an all-digital world while also still connecting to older legacy copper networks until they die a natural economic life. As an interesting side note, the same FCC has poured billions into extending the life of copper networks through the CAF II program.

Discussions about upgrading connections between carriers to IP fizzled out. The original FCC vision was to take a few years to study the best path to an all-IP interconnection network and then require telcos to move from the old TDM networks.

I recently had a client who wanted to establish an IP connection with one of the big legacy telcos. I know of some places where this is being done. The telco told my client that they still require interface using TDM, something that surprised my client. This particular big telco was not yet ready to accept IP trunking connections.

I’ve also noticed that the costs for my clients to buy connections into the SS7 network have climbed over the past few years. That’s really odd when you consider that these are old networks and the core technology is decades old. These networks have been fully depreciated for many years and the idea that the cost to use SS7 is climbing is absurd. This harkens back to paying $700 per month for a T1, something that sadly still exists in a few markets.

When the FCC first mentioned the IP transition I would have fully expected that TDM between carriers would have been long gone by now. And with that would have gone SS7. SS7 will still be around in the last-mile network and at the enterprise level since it’s built into the features used by telcos and in the older telephone systems owned by many businesses. The expectation from those articles a decade ago was that SS7 and other TDM-based technologies would slowly fizzle as older products were removed from the market. An IP-based telecom network is far more efficient and cost effective and eventually all telecom will be IP-based.

So I am a bit puzzled about what happened to the IP transition. I’m sure it’s still being talked about by policy-makers at the FCC, but the topic has publicly disappeared. Is this ever going to happen or will the FCC be happy to let the current interconnection network limp along in an IP world?