What Do You Know About SIP Trunking?

Telecom Business Review | Friday, August 20, 2021

SIP traffic routed over the public internet is not as secure as routing calls over a private connection.

Fremont, CA: SIP trunks are the most obvious candidate regarding reliability and taking a step towards the cloud. There is much more to SIP trunking. Here are six key things about SIP trunking before going down the SIP route.

1. Several ways to receive immediate ROI

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SIP trunking and cost optimization go together. When making a business case for SIP, the monthly rental charges evidence far more cost-effective than your present ISDN lines. It's also crucial to factor into your total cost of ownership (TCO) that SIP trunks do not require installation charges the first time or any time you need to add or remove SIP users.

You are required to install, move premises, or add new users for each pair of ISDN trunks. However, SIP does not require any physical infrastructure installed on your premises. Hence, removing the costs of time and materials.

Another long-term business benefit of SIP is on-net calling. As your sites progressively adopt SIP trunking, this reduces the cost of calling your colleagues. Rather than dialing from landline to landline and happening local and national call charges, SIP trunks join your sites over the internet.

Functionality, like disaster recovery and intelligent call routing, eliminates any unnecessary downtime from your business. If you can't answer the phone, you cannot process customer transactions or satisfy your support SLAs. When disaster recovery scenarios are set up, calls can be automatically redirected to other sites not suffering from the same disaster scenario. You should indicate recent power outages or connectivity failures to notice if you can build in time lost into your TCO.

2. Security

Despite the uptake of cloud technologies undergoing exponential growth, IT and Security Managers still cautiously adopt new technologies. A regular assumption is that they are unsafe because calls occur over the internet.

SIP traffic routed over the public internet is not as secure as routing calls over a private connection. However, you don't need to worry by ensuring your connection follows security best practices. SIP trunks simply carry the call data. Therefore, if your underlying connectivity is secure, the data transmitted across it will be just as secure. Therefore, in most scenarios, we recommend a private connection with segregated bandwidth for SIP calls.

3. Scalability

There is no limitation when provisioning SIP trunks. However, this does depend on your network requirements. As more users are added to your SIP trunk, more concurrent sessions are available via your SIP VLAN. Where bandwidth is easily available or can be made available, more SIP sessions are just required to be added to your existing setup.

The same applies to scaling down. Either forever or seasonally, you can decrease the number of SIP sessions you require as your business changes. This saves you from overpaying for unused services. A common outline with ISDN and PSTN lines is that you usually keep the lines running but unused for the next time you need to utilize them.

4. Legacy services

ISDN and PSTN services mainly carry voice traffic. But, ensure you don't overlook other services like fax, card machines, alarms, or other services connected to your phone lines.

Firstly, you should lead a physical audit around your sites to note exactly what is connected to your phone lines.

Then, you are ready to go if it's just the phone system(s). If you find analog services like a franking machine, you must prepare to continue these services over SIP. Usually, we deploy adapters and gateways when services are incompatible with SIP. Still, most modern versions of these services now incorporate their SIP connector.

5. Network

Your network and connectivity are the supreme enablers of SIP performance. With a solid network giving the backbone to your SIP calls, you shouldn't ever have to be concerned about a dip in quality.

When network configuration is not prepared for SIP traffic or bandwidth has not been made specially available, SIP generally suffers as it has to compete with other applications and services.

Latency, jitter and packet loss are regular symptoms of SIP trunks suffering from the absence of network readiness. Latency causes recurrent speech in VoIP calls. Jitter lead in patchy audio quality. Packet loss frequently results in delayed speech – when packets are not transmitted in full, the entire speech of the caller won't make it through.

Ensuring you have adequate bandwidth available is simple. By following the rule of 1MBps per 10 concurrent calls, you can quickly determine how much bandwidth you need to dedicate. In addition, when planning for SIP, ensure you factor in any lead time of updating your connectivity.

For network services and configuration, most providers support by performing a network readiness assessment for those IT departments without specialist resources.

6. Interoperability

When considering moving to SIP, it's important to ensure your PBX is SIP-compatible. SIP is such an extensively adopted technology that most PBXs in the modern workplace are interoperable. In addition, if your existing PBX is Mitel, Avaya or Cisco, you can likely replace your current phone line infrastructure with SIP.

Still, this little snippet of information is an absolute must before you start to plan your migration. The benefits outlined by making a relatively small investment in SIP will help you decide to move to SIP, but you may not be fully ready to plan and migrate just yet. 

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