Not so fast, you with the pushcart. To save this kind of money, you have to have the size of operation that spends that kind of money. I’m getting the number from the new Enterprise SIP Savings Estimator offered by XO Communications, a major competitive voice and data carrier.
What kind of business saves the big bucks? In this case, one with 1,000 employees located in 10 locations and making half their phone calls within the company. This is not at all unusual for Fortune 500 corporations. In fact, I’ll bet there are many companies in your city that meet this criteria. Perhaps you even work at one. If you are in charge of information technology or telecommunications, this is something that can make you a corporate hero. With nearly all businesses turning over every rock to find cost reductions, SIP services are well worth investigating.
What’s special about SIP and how does it work the savings magic? SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching protocol behind most VoIP implementations. In fact, when you hear the term SIP, you can bet the discussion involves VoIP telephony to some degree. The selling point of enterprise-level VoIP phone systems is that they are big money savers. But the question remains, “how?”
One big source of savings comes from the fact that we are in the digital age and companies large enough to have multiple business locations have those locations tied together with a WAN or Wide Area Network. Some do this with T1 lines and their own proprietary network topology. Others use a private cloud network, once Frame Relay and now MPLS, to create a mesh network that ties all locations together.
But what about telephone? The local PBX telephone system dominates with analog or ISDN PRI trunk lines for outgoing calls. Here’s where the savings come in. Right now you may need to use the public telephone network to make a call from a branch office to the main office or another branch. You pay for each of those calls. But, if you can press you data network to do double duty and transport voice as well as data, you can keep those internal phone calls on your own network and pay no toll charges at all. It’s almost free, since the data network has to be in place anyway.
SIP trunking is a technique that carries both voice and data on the same network. You don’t even need to connect your phone system to the public network. You can install a SIP trunk to a service provider that handles that at lower cost that you may be paying. The SIP trunking provider can also give you broadband Internet service over the same trunk without computer traffic interfering with voice traffic.
Oh, but you need to be a major corporation to save using SIP services, right? No, not at all. Most medium size companies and many small companies can also save money with SIP trunking in place of the separate phone lines and broadband services they buy now. How can you know if it makes sense for your operation? Easy. Get a competitive quote for SIP Trunking services and see just what the cost savings are. You may be surprised at what you’ve been missing out on.
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