More and more business are deploying SIP trunking to help them save money and support more advanced communications capabilities. One recent study from Infonetics says SIP trunking will overtake T1s as the preferred connection type among North American enterprises by 2015.
You might be wondering how SIP trunking can benefit your business. There are many ways, but it helps to first understand what SIP trunking is.
In the simplest terms, it enables your communications to use the Internet instead of the traditional telephone network. SIP trunking replaces traditional PRI trunks from your business telephone system, or PBX, to the public switched telephone network, or PSTN. SIP is delivered by a SIP Service Provider over existing broadband access, such as a T1, DSL, cable or Ethernet connection. SIP trunking works with a SIP-ready IP PBX or with traditional analog telephone systems by adding an integrated access device.
SIP trunking can benefit your organization in a number of ways, including reducing costs, streamlining management, supporting business continuity and disaster recovery, and enabling unified communications.
1. Cost savings. Savings can be realized in a number of ways. First, SIP trunking allows you to combine your voice and data networks over the same data connection — most likely one that you are already paying for. As such, it enables you to eliminate costly dedicated PRI trunks. And, because SIP trunking enables all office locations to function as one, it also enables you to consolidate your business telephone systems, eliminating duplicate hardware.
2. Streamlined Management. Centralizing your PBX makes it easier to manage and to deploy new services without worrying about the different systems at each location. Similarly, if you are a national company, you will have fewer service providers to manage since you no longer need regional providers. That said, you might choose to have multiple SIP providers as failover connections to support your business continuity plans.
3. Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery. There are inherent disaster recovery capabilities in SIP trunking as well. When there’s an outage or natural disaster, it’s easy to reroute SIP sessions to mobile phones or alternative DIDs, ensuring that calls are not dropped or unanswered.
4. Unified Communications. While SIP trunking is commonly associated with voice over IP calling, it also is a platform for enabling unified communications. SIP, or session initiation protocol, supports all sorts of real-time multimedia communications, such as presence, instant messaging, application sharing, white boarding and video conferencing. SIP trunking also makes it easier to connect to services that are hosted in the cloud.
For more information on the benefits of SIP trunking for your organization, contact info@finetele.com.
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