Manufacturers of profitable PBX systems, notorious for requiring forklift upgrades and heavy maintenance fees, need a new five-year plan: Call it survival.

Underlying the communications industry's vision of the future is the assumption that the migration from today's so-called narrowband environment to the brave new world of broadband will be smooth, evolutionary and even transparent. Unfortunately, it may look more like a forklift upgrade.

Rolm users were forced to choose between an expensive "forklift upgrade" and keeping their old box with its large power-and space-consumption, poor growth path, complex bridges to network services, and a dead-end technology incompatible with any future ISDN (integrated services digital network) upgrade.