SIP Trunk Reliability

Ask the SIP Trunk Expert

SIP Trunk Reliability

By Steven Johnson, President, Ingate Systems, Inc.  |  July 23, 2012

This article originally appeared in the July/August issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY

Businesses rely heavily on their voice network; as such, the standard for reliability needs to be much higher than what’s generally accepted for consumer use.   

The quality of SIP calls can be excellent. Digital packetization of voice has proven to be better than analog. This is because digital packets do not suffer from audio distortions, loss levels and other weaknesses. The quality of voice is directly related to the quality of the network, with the "weak link" of VoIP being latency in a slow network. A SIP-capable enterprise session border controller with QoS solves this problem.

Adding redundancy to the network ensures reliability. By installing a second E-SBC along with the primary E-SBC to create a failover pair, this multiple E-SBC distribution creates a resilient and fault-tolerant network to ensure that mission-critical applications such as voice are always available. The backup server might be a machine in another physical location, presumably not vulnerable to anything that would cause the primary host(s) to become unavailable.

As SIP trunks are delivered over the Internet, the connection to the Internet itself can potentially be a single point of failure. Using multiple Internet service providers avoids this issue should one connection go down. Also, since a SIP trunk is virtual, many service providers can have a primary then secondary route, should the primary become unavailable. Regardless, your E-SBC should have an option to be connected to a secondary ISP.

The tremendous growth of SIP trunk adoption by call centers is a sign that SIP trunks can be deployed business-class. The significant volume of calls makes cost-effective voice a priority, and since voice is the core of their business it has to be reliable.

For more information listen in to a recent Webinar we held with TMC (News - Alert) on “Successfully Deploying Enterprise SIP Trunking: Tools and Techniques for Overcoming Common Roadblocks.” It can be viewed here.

InGate is a sponsor of ITEXPO (News - Alert) West 2012. To be held Oct. 2-5 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX . ITEXPO offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. Be sure to check out InGate’s SIP Trunking Workshop for a series of UC and SIP Trunking-related sessions and seminars free to ITEXPO attendees. For more information on ITEXPO West 2012, click here.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi