Many businesses once married to the idea of having everything on their own servers are starting to come around to see the value of hosted services. SIP Trunking is grabbing attention as the way to go in the interim, and perhaps long term for companies who prefer a hybrid solution.

BroadSoft works with nearly 200 service providers offering SIP Trunking. Figuring out which one can meet your business’ specific needs can be tricky. A couple of key questions can get you started. While price often plays a role, it shouldn’t be the only or even most important consideration. Especially if the least expensive offering is not SIPconnect compliant, doesn’t ensure business continuity and falls short in enhanced services.

A first step is finding out if the SIP trunking service is delivered over a managed IP network with SLAs. This guarantees a single point of contact for trouble shooting and resolving issues. It also means the provider can deliver expected voice Quality of Service (QoS), unlike services that run over the public internet, which are inherently less reliable.

Network infrastructure is another important criteria– it can be the difference between reliable uptime and frequent outages. For service provider to scale to millions of users and meet uptimes of 99.999%, they must have carrier class VoIP network infrastructure. This ensures service availability for all but 6 seconds a day or five minutes a year. Enterprise-grade platforms like Asterisk, SIP Express Router, or home-grown technology often don’t have the proven track record of delivering five 9s of reliability or scaling beyond a few thousand users. Don’t be afraid to ask a provider for historical network uptime statistics.

Providers who can support Business Continuity must have redundant trunk groups into an enterprise IP PBX. This supports automatic re-routing and load sharing, so even in an outage, employees can access communications networks no matter where they are located. In worst case scenarios such as a natural disaster, this enables a business to continue operations.

SIPconnect is the industry standard for SIP trunking. If a service provider is not SIPconnect compliant they cannot guarantee all of your PBX features will work properly with their SIP trunking offer, or that their service will continue to work when you upgrade your PBX software (typically twice a year). A proper service provider will be certified interoperable with all leading IP PBX vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, and Nortel.

Finally, enhanced services are critical for businesses to remain competitive. By supporting Video, Mobile extensions, Telecommuters, and Unified Communications, a SIP Trunking provider helps you increase productivity and efficienty across your company. Examples of this include lower travel costs and less time lost in transit for employees who can connect virtually through video to communicate, attend meetings and training sessions. Through Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC), a single number service eliminates multiple voicemail boxes and lost time associated with two devices. Network-based services eliminate CAPEX and are PBX vendor independent.

We’ll be diving deeper into this subject at our upcoming users’ conference, BroadSoft Connections 2009: Voice & Vision. The session, Tap Trunking’s Possibilities, will look at how a number of operators have used business continuity as part of their SIP trunking proposition and the impact it has made to the success of their services.
BroadSoft & Microsoft Unified Communications Takes Off at Sprint

October 14, 2009 in Unified Communication | Tags: broadsoft, Chris Gatch, IP PBX, micro, SIP Trunking, Sprint, UC Unified Communications | by Alex Doyle | 1 comment

A few years back, CBeyond CTO Chris Gatch, a pioneer in SIP Trunking, famously said that using an IP PBX with TDM PRI circuits was “like driving a Ferrari on

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