Picture this: it’s a Tuesday morning, peak hours. A wireless handset on the floor goes dark. Dead. No display, no dial tone, nothing. Somebody puts in a ticket. IT scrambles to find a spare. There isn’t one. A call goes out to the manufacturer. That model was discontinued two years ago. Parts? Discontinued too. And now, one device failure has turned into an all-day project that pulls two people away from everything else they were supposed to be doing.
If you manage communications infrastructure for a large organization, you’ve probably been here. Maybe not with that exact device, but with that exact feeling.
Legacy telecom equipment like Avaya and Acom phones, Cisco handsets, Spectralink wireless devices, and Nortel systems keeps a lot of enterprises running. Hospitals rely on it. Schools depend on it. Manufacturers, logistics companies, and corporate campuses have entire operations built around it.
And for a long time, it just works. So nobody thinks much about it.
Then something breaks.
More than 82% of companies have suffered a major unplanned outage in the last three years, and depending on your industry, downtime can run $260,000 per hour. For most organizations, the conversation about legacy device support doesn’t happen until they’re already in the middle of an incident, hunting down parts, waiting on vendors, and watching the clock.
That’s the wrong time to have that conversation.
There’s a version of device management that a lot of IT teams fall into by default. A handset fails, they pull a spare from a closet. The closet runs dry, they put in a manufacturer order. The manufacturer says the part is end-of-life. Now they’re pricing out a full replacement on a timeline they weren’t ready for, at a budget they didn’t plan.
Meanwhile, broken devices accumulate in storage rooms. Some teams don’t even know what they have or what any of it is worth. Others pay someone to haul it away.
According to ITIC’s 2024 research, the average cost of a single hour of downtime now exceeds $300,000 for over 90% of mid-size and large enterprises. That’s not a data center catastrophe or a network breach. That’s one afternoon of scrambling because a device failed and nobody had a plan.
The organizations that handle this well aren’t necessarily running newer equipment. A lot of them are running the same legacy systems. The difference is they have a support structure behind them.
Devices that fail get turned around fast, often within 24 to 48 hours, instead of sitting in a pile waiting on a solution. Spares are managed and tracked, not forgotten in a storage closet. When equipment reaches the end of its useful life, there’s a buyback process that puts dollars back toward the next upgrade rather than writing it off as a loss. And IT isn’t the one coordinating all of it manually. They have a portal where they can see the status of every repair and replacement in real time.
The result is fewer operational disruptions, more predictable support costs, and an IT team that isn’t constantly fighting fires.
The question isn’t whether your legacy devices will eventually need attention. They will. The question is whether you want to handle it on your own schedule or get forced into it at the worst possible moment.
D&S Communications has spent 40 years supporting enterprise communications infrastructure, including the legacy systems that most vendors have already walked away from. Their support program for legacy telecom equipment is built specifically for organizations running Ascom, Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Spectralink, and similar devices, offering repair, refurbishment, fleet management, and a buyback program that helps fund whatever comes next. All managed through a centralized portal that gives your team full visibility without the chaos.
If you’re not sure where your fleet stands, a free assessment is a good place to start. Reach D&S Communications at 800-227-8403 or Sales@dscomm.com.
