A Guide for Selecting a SIP Trunking Providers

Posted on April 18, 2018 by Andrea Mocherman

SIP Trunking is a form of telephony that is gaining real traction in the business world. A SIP trunk connects your premise-based telephony directly to the Public Telephone Network (PSTN) via IP/broadband. It is commonly sold as a replacement to ISDN. The typical values that businesses look for in a SIP Trunking provider are reliability, cost-saving, scalability, and flexibility, and understandably so.

Considerations before selecting a SIP Trunking Provider

Before you make any decisions, take a minute to stack rank the importance of the following qualities for your business.

  1. Quality of Service: Customers expect instantaneous, seamless and flawless voice and messaging services out of the gate. Anything less can negatively affect the company’s reputation, productivity, and customer loyalty.
  2. Simplicity of operations: Onboarding new users and porting phone numbers can be two of the biggest challenges that businesses face when it comes to moving to a new SIP Trunking provider. It’s important that a provider offers simplified operations to ensure smooth adoption and control over the porting process. A provider with reliable operations will have extensive experience with onboarding and automated porting, as well as with the call flow design, support, service, and custom implementations processes.
  3. Control: Control and direct access to telecom resources such as phone numbers, inbound/outbound calling, call routing, text messaging and advanced signaling data are imperative criteria to consider when evaluating potential SIP Trunking providers. If you do not have direct access to telephony resources from your SIP Trunking provider, operating processes can be delayed, leading to potential negative consequences for the customer experience.
  4. Reliability: The right provider will significantly improve the reliability of your inbound calls by mitigating outage time. The worst thing for your business is to suffer outages, whether that is through a DDoS attack or an outage with your service provider. It is important to understand the extent of your SIP Trunking providers ability to quickly detect network impairments, and re-route the traffic around the impairments to successfully complete your inbound calls.

How a SIP phone service benefits your company

The beauty of SIP trunking is that it is extremely easy to scale up or down depending on your business requirements. This is extremely pertinent to companies anticipating a great period of growth. The ability to dynamically scale depending on the volume of calls made and received is what makes SIP trunking stand out to companies looking to make and receive unlimited calls simultaneously.

Because SIP trunks are virtual rather than physical, scaling and maintenance are much easier. While old trunks require an expensive installation of circuits and termination points, SIP trunks can be easily adjusted with a change to the software configuration. So, not only do SIP trunks save businesses money in terms of maintenance, they also save time as there’s no need to spend weeks talking back and forth with technicians every time a new line needs to be installed.

Why is SIP Better Than PSTN?

Whether it is now or in the future, SIP trunking is the future of communications, so start planning your migration now. There has long been talk that the PSTN will eventually be phased out, and considering the rapid growth of VoIP solutions and SIP Trunking, it seems like that time is coming sooner rather than later.

So let’s take some time to better understand the value of SIP Trunking versus the PSTN.  

  1. Cost savings: Instead of monthly shock and confusion over your voice communications statement, businesses that switch to a SIP Trunking provider usually enjoy more predictable monthly costs.
  2. No additional hardware required: SIP trunking does not require additional hardware investment. With many alternative methods of telephony, such as PRIs, your business may need to invest in costly additions to hardware as you scale phone lines. With a SIP provider, adding phone lines or add-on services is as simple as making a purchase on Amazon.
  3. Increased reliability: While traditional telephone service can be interrupted due to weather events, DDoS attacks, or human error. With a SIP trunking provider that offers failover as a form of redundancy, your phones can be used for communications even in case of some failure by allowing you to route your calls to other offices or mobile devices.
  4. Simplicity of adding new services: SIP trunking and VoIP phones offer easy-to-use administrative portals for on-site management, including actions like adjusting call routing, faxing, or adding new phone numbers in real-time.

Is SIP Trunking right for your business?

While SIP Trunking is a very well-established gateway to significant cost savings, reliability, and flexibility, the reality is no two organizations are the same. While SIP trunking offers few disadvantages, it does require sufficient data connectivity bandwidth to work effectively, as well as a person internally who can set up your SIP Trunks with your VoIP solution.

Contact us to learn more about how Flowroute’s SIP Trunking can enhance your business communications and how much you stand to save with SIP trunking.