SIP Trunking: Putting VoIP Routers to Work Benefiting Enterprises and Service Providers

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

SIP trunking has been around for a few years now, but understanding its importance and benefits is as valuable as ever. By being educated about this technology, enterprises and service providers alike stand to benefit in a big way.

Traditional PBXs use a multi-line phone trunk to hook up with the “outside world” via the public switched telephone network (PSTN). SIP trunking services, offered by internet telephony services providers (ITSPs), instead use IP technology to provide that same connection. SIP trunking involves the uses of VoIP routers to create some pretty powerful advantages.

In a recently published white paper, Patton (News - Alert) explains how enterprises and services providers can benefit from SIP trunking.

Enterprise Advantages

For enterprises, there are four distinct benefits of SIP trunking. 

Lower total cost of ownership through reduced long distance call charges, less capital expenditure (CAPEX), and more efficient operations. SIP trunking, combined with least cost routing, makes it much cheaper to make and receive calls. A single platform for voice and data traffic effectively consolidates communications equipment and maintenance, saving companies a bundle.

More productive employees, though the use of unified communications tools, conferencing and other collaborative tools. SIP trunking helps efficiently connect employees in geographically distant offices. Plus, with SIP trunking there is less need to use cell phones as a means of communication for road warriors.

Improved customer satisfaction, achieved through better business processes. Because SIP trunking is a text-based protocol, it opens up all kinds of possibilities for better customer service, including online chat accessible from within customer relationship management (CRM) software and web-based click to call options.

Protection through failover and redundancy, thanks to SIP trunking’s ability to connect to many service providers so if one network fails, another can quickly jump in and pick up the slack.

Service Provider Advantages

SIP trunking is beneficial for service providers, too. Some of the advantages in this realm are similar, such as lower CAPEX and operating expenditures (OPEX (News - Alert)). Others, like lower costs of deployment and delivery (same conduit used for voice and data) and more efficient management of moves, adds and changes (MAC), are specific to service providers.

Conclusion

Patton’s whitepaper explores not only the benefits of SIP trunking, but also covers other important, related topics. It explains how SIP trunking implementation works, the pros and cons of different setups (e.g. legacy PBX (News - Alert) and IP-PBX), some of the common issues with setting up SIP trunking (including interoperability, security and quality of service). Several different VoIP gateway router solutions for SIP trunking are discussed to give a sense of what’s possible. 

Related Links

Patton, 3CX and FaxBack Form Alliance for IP-Centric Enterprise Networks
Patton, 3CX and FaxBack Join Forces
Patton Electronics' First Mile Ethernet Modem Earns NGN Leadership Award for 2010 
TMC Awards Patton's SmartNode Session Border Controller

(source: http://voip-routers.tmcnet.com/topics/sip-trunking/articles/111710-sip-trunking-putting-voip-routers-work-benefiting-enterprises.htm)