SIP Trunks have well and truly arrived.
SIP Trunks have become the leading next-generation communications solution for UK businesses and the market will continue to grow at a rapid rate, especially since BT announced that they intend to switch off their ISDN network in 2025. Whilst ISDN has been dependable to businesses over the last few decades, it is inflexible and costly compared to next generation voice services such as SIP trunks and hosted business phone systems which are built around Voice over IP. SIP trunk services allow businesses to operate more freely by providing superior telephone numbering and call routing options as well as disaster recovery capabilities that ISDN cannot match.
Yet many businesses remain reluctant to make the move to SIP trunk services and the main reasons for making do with traditional services include lack of in-house skills to manage the change, concerns regarding reliability and cost. Whilst these concerns may have had some merit 10 years ago, SIP trunks services are now mature and combined with the right connectivity, incredibly reliable as well. The most compelling reason for SIP trunk service adoption is that it provides a service with far greater flexibility, along with better reliability and scalability.
Convergence Opportunity
One of the great benefits of adopting a SIP trunk service is that customers can use their existing internet connection to carry the voice traffic and upgrade their telephony with little disruption to day-to-day operations. This allows businesses to converge voice and data and remove traditional line rental charges. SIP trunks services are also designed with business continuity in mind and resilient design builds allow you to route calls automatically to alternative telephone numbers or sites in the event of an outage, making it far easier to cope when things do go wrong very occasionally. Long gone are the days when you need to call your service provider to invoke a temporary call divert which might take several hours to action depending on where your business is in the queue of routing changes required on any particular day.
Peace of Mind
SIP trunks can be combined with cost-effective, high performance Internet services such as EFM, FTTC and Fibre Ethernet to provide very reliable services backed by comprehensive service level agreements and automated continuity services to give businesses peace of mind and allowing them to concentrate on core competencies.
Scalability and Flexibility
Traditional ISDN lines are too restrictive in many cases. For instance if you move office you cannot retain your telephone numbers if you move out of the local telephone exchange areas as the numbers are tied to the exchange. This means either losing your telephone numbers or paying expensive remote call forwarding charges. None of this occurs with SIP trunk services as the telephone numbers are managed at network level, meaning if you move your telephone numbers can go with you. Furthermore SIP trunks services provide scalability, allowing you to start with a small allocation (just 2 channels compared to 8 with ISDN30) and scale up easily as you grow. Equally during quieter times and demand is slow, it’s easy to scale back the number of channels you use, thereby ensuring you only ever use and pay for what you actually need. SIP Trunk services are also very flexible when it comes to telephone numbering. You could for instance operate telephone number ranges in Leeds, London, Glasgow and Manchester and have all calls routed to a single site allowing you to advertise local numbers without the expense of operating offices in every city.
SIP Trunk Cost Savings
The consolidation of voice and data can result in major customer savings. SIP trunk services remove the requirement for traditional lines and SIP trunk rental usually results in a rental saving of 50% or more compared to ISDN. Calls are also considerably cheaper on SIP trunk services compared to their traditional conterparts as well. When the above cost savings are combined with the built-in disaster recovery and automated call routing options, telephone numbering flexibility, scalability and above all business grade reliability it’s easy to see why SIP trunk sales have overtaken traditional line sales at Columbus and many other service providers besides. If you have not considered next generation voice services such as SIP trunks and Hosted Phone Systems before why not speak to a Columbus expert who will be happy to review your current set up and provide straightforward recommendations whether you are ready to move to next generation services now or whenever the time is right for your business.
