The network was never supposed to be a CX problem. For years, it wasn't. Telecom engineers leaned on the PSTN's built-in inefficiency as a quality guarantee, and the broader industry was happy to leave well enough alone.
That era is ending.
With the UK's PSTN shutdown locked in for January 2027, organizations still routing contact center calls over legacy infrastructure now have a hard deadline. But as Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, makes clear in this conversation, the bigger risk isn't missing the migration window. It's treating it as a straight swap.
"You shouldn't be taking this new technology and making it look like the old technology," Kerravala says. "It should be, 'how do I modernize my network and do a bunch of different things.'"
The problem is that modernizing means running voice traffic across shared, IP-based networks, exactly the kind of environment where LLM-driven bots add another 200-300 milliseconds of latency on top of existing SIP delay. When the bot feels slow, someone has to explain why.