With the ever-looming death of the ISDN and increasing reliance on internet-based cloud communications, for any business that’s looking to futureproof their comms, SIP trunks have taken center stage on the CTO shopping list. In fact, in a recent Nemertes study, 57% of businesses had already adopted or planned to adopt SIP trunking.
But with all this hype, is SIP trunking just a buzz word or are there genuine cost savings for businesses looking to expand the reach of their comms?
Why change?
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, right? Well, not always. The good old copper wire has done some good work over the years keeping us all connected on the plain old telephone system (POTS) but over time it’s not proven to be the most cost-efficient method.
If you just have a single phone in your house, the POTS is a great option for calling your Auntie Carol about her new puppy. But if you’re a growing business with hundreds of calls in and out of your business every hour, there are huge costs associated with maintaining this sort of capacity using legacy telephone systems.
Thankfully in the age of the internet and VoIP calling, we have SIP trunking. This is basically a way to make calls using a data network – like the internet or a privately owned network (like ours) – that is the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network), the name given to the aggregate of the world’s interconnected legacy telephone networks.
What’s so cost-efficient about SIP trunking?
Well, essentially with SIP trunking, there are no problems with capacity. The way it works is similar to your internet bandwidth. The more calls you need to make the more channels you need in your SIP trunk.
Back in the day, you got channels on the POTS, but they came in batches of 30ish. The problem is though, what happens if you only want 50? Tough, you can get 30 or 60. You choose.
And what happens if you’re having a quiet month and you no longer need 60 channels? Tough, you can’t downgrade so you’re paying for something you’re not using.
With SIP trunks you have the option of increasing or decreasing the number of channels you need as and when you need them in almost real time. Win-win.
The ROI of SIP trunking
Let’s get down to brass tacks. How much money are you really going to save by shifting to this new technology? Well, in a recent study by Nemertes Research, nearly half (44.9%) of the ~600 organizations they interviewed reduced their overall PSTN access spend by an average of 16.1% through the adoption of SIP trunking.
In addition, the overall operational cost of managing your unified communications platforms drops by an average of 39%.
SIP trunking services are expanding beyond simply providing PSTN access to meet the needs of digital transformation. Modern SIP trunking services provide capabilities to support digital transformation including:
- Virtual phone numbers that can be easily provisioned to support marketing programs or to establish a local number dial-in presence in a remote country to reduce calling costs.
- Emergency call routing for all locations.
- Enabling texting to and from business numbers.
- Integration of business processes with messaging, enabling sending of appointment reminders, marketing campaign messages, or other alerts from business process applications directly to mobile devices.
