Gamma’s Edge Migrate: turning the UK’s PSTN switch-off into a strategic channel opportunity

The UK’s 150-year-old Public Switched Telephone Network will be decommissioned in less than nine months’ time, after years of false starts and various desperate campaigns by network operators around the importance of shifting off vintage connectivity onto a modern alternative.

Despite this, over two million PSTN connections remain on borrowed time, with around a quarter serving businesses, and a growing imperative to finalise the national migration before services are lost.

“The PSTN drum’s been banging for many years, but the clock is definitely ticking now”, said Mark Boden, Channel Director at communications-enabler Gamma. “If we haven’t moved what we need to move in the next few months, then it’s ‘done’ at that point”, he warned.

In conversations with channel partners, of which Gamma has more than 1,500, Boden said he has heard “every flavour” of response to the imminent switch-off, with some cognisant of the risk of non-movement and keen to complete migration, and others willing to let the network expire untended.

By the 31 January 2027 deadline, when BT is set to retire the PSTN and Openreach withdraws its remaining Wholesale Line Rental products (while also significantly increasing legacy line rental pricing throughout 2026), he considers it will be too late to make the switch on any reasonable basis. “It’ll be costly because it will be lost, or costly because there’ll be options driven at a desperate market”.

Providing context, and a single example among many, Boden cited an in-progress engagement that is migrating around 40,000 broadband circuits onto latest technology in a relatively short window using Gamma’s managed Edge Migrate service.

While currently an antidote to the frustrations of the UK PSTN shutdown, he also emphasises Edge Migrate’s versatility to take on a wide range of platform and service housekeeping projects, not just infrastructure change.

“ Of the many conversations with partners, the message was clear: partners frankly want the headache to be taken away… Allowing somebody like Gamma to sweep up the challenge that they’ve got whilst they’re focusing on driving net new business. ”

Boden.

One migration after another: PSTN is just the first…

The PSTN use-case is front of mind given the imminent deadline, but Edge Migrate was not built for just PSTN, with Boden pointing to the “huge opportunity in terms of where we take it next”.

“ There’ll be further [customer and technology] iterations and evolution, as there always are in our market. Edge Migrate will continue to underpin all that, and extend and evolve with it. ”

Boden.

Edge Migrate was designed from the outset for migrations “right across the spectrum of technology”, including SIP.

SIP is often plugged into a PBX (Private Branch Exchange), which may benefit from migration to UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) and Gamma is also experiencing what Boden called “quite a big growth stage” in UCaaS-to-UCaaS migrations. Here, Edge Migrate provides the framework, with a “professional services army” to drive the transition forward.

“ Ultimately, Edge Migrate is aimed at a few things: it could be a compelling event (such as the PSTN switch off); it could be supplier consolidation (be it through a partner acquiring businesses and ending up with quite a mixed portfolio); it could be decisions they’ve made years ago (that were right at the time but perhaps not right now); and everything in between.

It’s all aimed around streamlining partners’ businesses, making them optimum in terms of how they go to market, knowing that we can mop up behind them in terms of migration activity. ”

Boden.

From A to a better B, wherever B may be

PSTN is an enforced migration, and so Boden acknowledges that there are some partners that simply want a like-for-like move to ensure service continuity.

Edge Migrate allows for a migration “without any bells and whistles” to account for these. For everyone else, however, including those conducting migrations between different technologies as a strategic imperative, Gamma evolved its portfolio to suit.

“ It’s about having the right products, which Gamma has built over the last four or five years, to make sure that if it’s ‘A to B’, that ‘B’ is the appropriate product. ”

Boden.

This has included a change in approach for Gamma as it built the Edge Migrate offering. It has relaxed an earlier reluctance to permit bring-your-own-device onto its UCaaS platforms, for example, in order to enable partners to reuse historic handset investment after a migration. “That’s been a massive barrier to entry that we’ve addressed”, Boden said.

Another is ensuring that “not only are you matching what you’re moving away from, it’s actually exceeding it”. This includes implementing enhancements to include security and AI-powered services to make a migration worth pursuing beyond merely being compelled to move, as in the PSTN instance.

For those moving from deprecated ISDN/PSTN technology, Boden said there is the opportunity for UCaaS, as well as for those moving from UCaaS to UCaaS, with further connectivity options and security layers. “It’s not growth for growth’s sake; when you cross- and up-sell additional products, that’s all aimed around creating value for the end-customer”.

UCaaS-to-UCaaS migration is positioned as a security and resilience play as much as a refresh, with competitor platform outages and breaches cited as catalysts for Gamma’s partners to move customers off what they “perceive to be risky technology”.

As easy as 1, 2, 3 — Audit, Plan, Execute…

Boden considers there to be three key stages to the migration process: an analysis, or audit, of a partner’s existing estate; a planning phase, which can include strategy for migration of hardware, software, and processes; and the execution.

The audit is tailored to the partner, drawing in data on customers and the service provision model to enable a deep-dive analysis. It ranges from security audits to scoping end-user devices, spearheaded by Gamma’s internal professional services business, to understand where starting point ‘A’ is. Boden notes Gamma’s intent to continue investing in the tooling portfolio to support the audit phase, reflecting the scale of opportunity seen in Edge Migrate.

The planning that follows is led by the partner, which dictates the desired end-point, while Gamma handles how to get there. This includes consideration of how to leverage the partner’s previous investments to mitigate waste and ensure migration is as cost-effective as possible.

The final phase, execution, is “often the tricky bit for most partners”, Boden said: “physically moving something from A to B, and understanding and mitigating the risk of doing that”.

Throughout each stage, the migration resource is delivered by Gamma. Strategic partners and suppliers are utilised for tooling where needed, with the likes of Cisco powering some services, for example, but he estimates that 90%-plus of the Edge Migrate process is resourced internally. One thing Gamma does not have is hundreds of field engineers “running around the country plugging things in”. “That’s not our business, but we’re in a technological world now where that’s not really required”.

Edge evolution

Edge Migrate is around one year old as a defined service, but it is built on years of hard-earned experience from Gamma-led migrations and listening to partners’ pain points.

“We listened and we saw a gap in what partners needed”, Boden said, with demand heard from partners at senior leadership and executive committee level. Previously, Gamma might have “kept chipping away” at a customer migration over a long period of time with varying success rates.

Following a strategic-level partner experience review led by Gamma’s executive committee, improved and simplified migrations emerged as a key demand. In its first months in the market, Edge Migrate has seen a “huge uptick in success” of migrations, with the product driving “significant net new business”, according to Boden.

The product has been immediately successful in the SMB space, and Boden expects it to also draw mid-market and enterprise customers seeking additional capabilities such as Webex for Gamma and upcoming new Cisco Contact Centre solutions.

Boden’s closing message to partners is that the B-point destination matters more than the migration itself. “Some partners made what might have been the right decision at the time, but a wrong decision now”, he says, pointing to Cisco and Microsoft as the vendors that are positioned to “win the UCaaS race”, including deploying R&D spend at a scale that rivals cannot match. Pick the right destination, and the partner’s journey becomes a Gamma responsibility that will be addressed with Edge Migrate.

“ And I think this market direction is supporting us [and partners with Edge Migrate]: it’s almost going down ‘the brand route’ as well as features and functionality, as opposed to ‘it’s just UCaaS’, knowing that [the winners of the UCaaS race are] going to put R&D that is unrivalled by anyone in the market.

So I think it’s a ‘pick the right vendor in terms of technology moving forward’, and then ‘know that you’ve got somebody like Gamma that can take you on that journey from A to B that will be seamless and won’t interrupt your business as a partner, to allow you to focus on growth and day-to-day business’. ”

Boden.