Digital Transformation is the theme for the 20s, the 2020s that is. Finding its footing a couple short decades ago, VoIP is permeating businesses both large and small, enabling reliable, secure and feature-rich communications. Choosing a VoIP solution, and stepping into modern communications is a decision that requires due diligence. The VoIP Gateway buyer’s journey is more than checking a few boxes and comparing available unified communications (UC and VoIP) products and services.
Before embarking on the buying journey determine what you are going to do as an organization. Starting from the top, will you convert incoming POTS to VoIP, or is the intention to connect a traditional PBX (News - Alert) based phone system into an IP network? If converting POTS, your VoIP gateway empowers telephony functionality over the internet. When performing the latter, the VoIP gateway offers ports to bridge IP network and traditional phone lines.
There are two types of VoIP Gateways available: analog and digital. Digital units leverage digital lines or circuits – BRI ISDN, PRI/E1 lines or Fibre – to deliver digital communications. PRI is popular because it can support voice, video, data and other network services whereas BRI cannot offer the same level of performance, and only supports one channel. Analog VoIP Gateways, on the other hand will deliver anywhere from 2 to 24 lines by utilizing legacy analog phone lines.
A VoIP Gateway (News - Alert) is capable of supporting myriad IP telephony use cases, and moving further into modern communications includes the exploration of media gateway solutions to address TDM to SIP or vice versa, for example.
What will the deployment look like? Is your organization migrating from legacy to IP PBX? With a SIP to TDM deployment, an organization can continue business as usual, while migrating to a more modern telephony system. Flipping this model around, a TDM to SIP deployment offers businesses a means to bypass costly PSTN tolls by leveraging the right gateway to connect a pocket friendly SIP trunk with legacy telephony to improve communications. Another aesthetic brings together your “best in breed, future-forward” IP communications system – cloud, on-premises, hosted or virtual – to a legacy PTSN trunk.
We’ve barely scratched the surface, but these are early days in your VoIP Gateway buyer journey and our hope is inspiration, investigation and exploration, empowering informed decisions and best practice along the way.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
