Planning to upgrade or expand your legacy phone system? Need to save money and reduce the complexity of your telecoms infrastructure? Want to take full advantage of advanced communications solutions like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or Unified Communications (UC)?
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, it’s time you talked to SIP trunking service providers. And you’ll be in good company.
Deployment of SIP trunking was set to grow from 38 per cent of companies surveyed in 2013 to 51 per cent in 2015, while the numbers using TI lines were expected to fall from 71 to 55 percent in the same period. That’s according to a 2013 study by research firm Infonetics Research – SIP Trunking and SBC Strategies: North American Enterprise Survey.
The firm commented, “We surveyed close to 300 businesses about their SIP trunking and enterprise SBC plans and one trend is clear: SIP trunking adoption is growing as businesses seek to improve the reliability and lower the cost of communication services.”
Make the Right Connections
Your service provider is a gateway to low calling costs and advanced multimedia communications. You’ve got a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) on your premises connected to the public telephone network. That network carries your voice calls on traditional analog cabling and you incur an escalating range of charges for local and long-distance calls.
Forget all that. The new connection is all digital and it links your PBX to an Internet Telephony Service Provider. If you’re familiar with Skype, you’ll know that calls over that Internet service are free to any location in the world. SIP can’t promise you all free calls, but it can make massive inroads into your traditional telephone bill.
Here’s how. Calls to international destinations travel as though they were calls to local numbers. Calls between your own sites linked by this technology are free. Your provider can offer you a number of packages to suit your own calling patterns. So, if you make frequent calls to one country or a region, check out the available deals.
Go Multimedia
When your provider connects you, you can open up a new world of communications. That single trunk that used to transmit just voice signals now carries data, video and Internet traffic. One circuit for all your traffic means no more separate circuits to install, maintain and upgrade – quite a cost-saving on legacy infrastructure.
Combined with a VoIP or Unified Communication service, your new connection gives you access to advanced services like Presence, Follow Me call forwarding, Unified Messaging, voicemail to email, Internet fax and web or video conferencing.
With those services on board, you can look forward to big improvements in productivity, efficiency, collaboration and the quality of customer service. And, you can use the network’s data capability to integrate popular business applications like customer relationships management, calendar or helpdesk systems for even greater business benefit.
All Together Now
If your business operates on a number of different sites, there’s a good chance you’ve got separate infrastructure at each location and a team to look after it. Your service provider can link all the sites with a single, centralized solution.
Get rid of the duplicate infrastructure and put the IT team to better use. Now all the sites can enjoy the same features and services and all they need is a router and a good Internet connection. With a special feature called Pooled Concurrent Call Paths, you can even share capacity across all your sites. So, if one site experiences higher-than-average call volumes, it can draw on any spare capacity in the network. No need to install surplus capacity on a just-in-case basis.
To add to the benefits, calls between sites are free – for voice, video and data. You don’t just save money, you make group communications simpler and more efficient. Set up daily business update calls or monthly conferences. Share production and sales data over the same secure network.
Choose Quality, Reliability and Security
With so many potential benefits, what should you look for in a SIP trunking service provider? First up is call quality. We’re talking digital networks here rather than old-fashioned analog cabling. So expect higher levels of reliability as standard. And you’ll find Quality of Service and failover options in the networks of reputable suppliers.
The top providers go even further to ensure quality and reliability. They offer an end-to-end digital solution that takes in the “last mile” which retains its legacy status on many networks.
As for security, these networks incorporate Session Border Controllers, secure VoIP interconnects and separate network access routers to protect networks, privacy and data. The top providers run their connections over private Internet circuits to bypass any of the threats lurking on the public Internet.
The question is no longer if, but when should you move your communications to the next level. Find out just how easy the process is from your service provider.