SIP Trunking Providers Want Your Bandwidth

The telephone industry is changing. Not long ago, the standard setup for most companies was an in-house PBX system managing dozens, hundreds or thousands of phones. For outside calls, the most cost effective approach has been to bring in ISDN PRI trunk lines with 23 local and/or long distance lines each. Even small companies chose key telephone systems that can handle two to six outside lines. Those setups are changing fast.

There are two strong trends in the industry right now. One is cloud based hosted PBX telephone and the other is SIP trunking. They work perfectly together, but you can also have SIP trunking without cloud services.

A telephone trunk is a number of telephone lines all bundled together. This can be a wire bundle, such as a multi-line copper cable. It can also be an electrical bundle on a single line. ISDN PRI trunks, for instance, bundle 23 separate phone lines plus Caller ID and switching on a single T1 line. A SIP trunk is a telephone trunk line designed specifically to work with IP phones in VoIP telephone systems. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching technology used in VoIP in lieu of SS7, which is used in traditional switched circuit telephony.

So, why are SIP trunks such a hot item right now? It’s because a SIP trunk can be connected directly to your network or IP PBX to bring in multiple lines from your VoIP carrier. On a converged local area network, you are already running SIP. Why go to the trouble to converting to another protocol just to gain access to the public telephone network?

SIP trunks are also how you connect to a hosted PBX system as a cloud service. Companies are rapidly discovering that the per-seat cost of a cloud based telephone service is less than they pay now when you count the personnel, operating and maintenance costs of an in-house phone system. With hosted PBX, you no longer have to invest in new hardware every few years and your system is always being maintained and upgraded by the service provider.

It stands to reason that SIP trunking providers want your telephone business, but why do they want your bandwidth?

The reason that your carrier wants to provide you with both telephone lines and Internet bandwidth is so they can guarantee the quality of your phone calls. With traditional telephony, the telephone and computer networks are kept completely separate and cannot possibly interfere with each other. One of the cost saving advantages of enterprise VoIP solutions is that they use the corporate data network for everything. To make that work, you need to prioritize voice packets so that your phone conversations don’t distort or break up no matter what the computers are doing.

When your SIP trunking provider delivers both telephone and Internet service on your trunk line, they prioritize packets using CoS or Class of Service tags. These tags tell all equipment that recognizes them how to handle different types of traffic to ensure service quality. Not all bandwidth providers do this, so if you mix various line services you can wind up undoing your carefully engineered network quality.

There’s also a cost advantage, especially for small businesses who get both telephone and broadband on one line instead of two. You don’t even need IP phones to take advantage of this service. The provider will install an Integrated Access Device (IAD) that can connect to conventional analog phones and your broadband router.

Now that you know why SIP Trunking providers want your bandwidth, why not find out what sort of deal they’ll make to get it? Request competitive quotes for telephone trunking, dedicated Internet access and cloud hosted PBX services now.

Rise Of The Cloud Hosted PBX

The days of the in-house PBX or Private Branch Exchange may be numbered. AireSpring, one of the fastest growing and most innovative of the competitive carriers, is now offering a cloud hosted PBX system they call AirePBX. With AirePBX, the PBX disappears but the phones remain.

In a way, we're going back in time to move forward. In the beginning, all switching was done at the telephone company central office and all phones were connected to the telco switch. Then came in-house telephone operator switchboards and later automated switchboards called Key Telephone Systems (KTS) and Private Branch Exchanges (PBX). What a cloud hosted PBX does is move the switching system back to the service provider.

So, how can you save money by going back to an earlier network architecture? A lot has changed in the last century. For one thing, the monolithic “Ma Bell” no longer exists. There are a lot of competitive carriers vying for your business. That alone offers better pricing options. Technology has also changed. Phones no longer need their own network. With VoIP, the telephone shares the same network as all the company computers, printers and other devices. The fact that you don’t need special proprietary wiring to connect to your phone service provider further increases competitive offerings and available features.

The idea behind a hosted VoIP system or cloud hosted PBX is that the expensive PBX system and its need for constant attention is taken over by a supplier who is in the PBX telephone business. That’s not the business you are in, is it? In fact, having to buy, install and maintain this equipment doesn’t really give you a competitive advantage at all. It’s just one more thing you pay for to get the communications services you need.

This is why companies are more than happy to ditch their venerable PBX in favor of a cloud solution. They are especially open to this alternative if their PBX is temperamental, nearing capacity, too old to be maintained, or too limited in features. Sure, you can go out and buy a shiny new model and do a “forklift upgrade.” Stop and think, though. Do you really want to shell out the thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of dollars needed for a new PBX, or would you rather pay as you go?

Let’s take a look at what AirePBX has to offer. You don’t have a PBX system in-house anymore. You just have IP phones plugged into your network and AireSpring provides those. No capital investment required. Each phone has its own voicemail. You can even get visual voicemail. Even though the PBX is hosted remotely, your internal call routing is still free, as are local outside calls. An auto-attendant is included to direct incoming calls. You can set up hunting for workgroups, add toll free numbers and virtual private numbers, have conference calls, and enjoy all the features you’d expect in a modern business phone system.

All of this is fully managed by AireSpring on their next generation IP backbone network to ensure voice quality and system availability. Compared to the often dicey performance of Internet VoIP implementations, this is head and shoulders better. AirePBX is an enterprise VoIP solution that scales easily for small and medium companies, too.

Are you in search of a better business telephone system for your company? If so, you may be surprised and delighted by the capabilities and low costs of the new cloud hosted PBX solutions. Why not get a quote for hosted VoIP phone services and see if you can have the business communications you need without the cost and aggravation of maintaining your own in-house telephone system.