What is SIP Trunks and what are it's benefits?

At this point, many business owners have heard of SIP trunking; however, they may not fully understand what the technology entails. That means they may not know if their business can benefit from it.

So, what is SIP exactly? SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol, is fundamental technology for signaling and controlling multimedia communications. To this end, a SIP trunk is not all too different from a traditional phone line. The biggest difference is that a SIP trunk eliminates the need for a physical wire, instead allowing businesses to operate using “virtual” phone lines provided by a SIP trunk provider. This provider uses a company’s data circuit (i.e. T1, cable, DSL) to connect its phone system back to their network.

Ultimate Scalability

With legacy telephony, increasing capacity requires you to purchase additional physical lines from the phone company, which is expensive and often time-consuming. To protect against having to scale up this way, businesses often purchase enough lines to handle peak capacity, which means resources are wasted when traffic is slower. Because SIP trunks are virtual lines, the infrastructure necessary to capacity when and where you need is already in place. In other words, you only pay for what you use.

Significant Cost Savings

When you add SIP trunks to a high-quality PBX service you can drastically reduce expenses in several ways. First, you eliminate monthly charges from a service provider. Second, with SIP trunks every call becomes local, so your long distance calling expenses are slashed as well. You can also save money by paying for one service for communications, rather than a separate voice and data plan. Finally, as was mentioned above, SIP trunks make it easy to scale your system without adding physical phone lines, which always come at a cost.

Greater Reliability

SIP trunks are extremely stable, because as virtual lines they are not susceptible to local power outages resulting from weather events or equipment failure. The technology also allows call to be routed to pre-determined locations if a primary office location goes offline for any reason. Considering even a few minutes of downtime can cost a business thousands of dollars, business continuity is a major advantage of SIP trunking.

Compatibility with IP-PBX Phone Systems

SIP trunks can be seamlessly integrated with SIP based communications like the 3CX Phone System for Windows. Our system—which includes a variety of features like mobile clients, unified communications etc.—replaces an entire legacy phone system, with the SIP trunk taking the place of old style phone lines.

Overall

Investing in a SIP trunk provider an offer quick and considerable savings for many organizations. In most cases, this system can provide a rapid return on investment. SIP not only offers VoIP calling, but this system provides many other useful features. The best aspect of implementing SIP trunking is the amount of savings. Moreover, these savings can come from many different areas and help organizations of many different types and sizes.