Why BYOC has changed the telco landscape for the better

Cloud communications and CPaaS have been on the rise in recent years, as use of the less-efficient public switched telephone network (PSTN) has declined. Hardware-heavy legacy systems such as internal private branch exchanges (PBXs) are also being steadily replaced by hosted cloud alternatives. One of the reasons for this migration to CPaaS is the emergence of the bring-your-own-carrier (BYOC) telecommunications service model.

Communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) makes it possible for systems developers to program telephony functionality directly into their own platforms, enabling them to deliver the best available user experience to their customers. And BYOC gives them control over who actually provides those telephony functions.

What is BYOC?

BYOC, also sometimes called Direct Routing, is a telecom service model in which businesses bring the telecom services carrier of their choosing to their CPaaS or other cloud communications platform.

Fundamentally, BYOC is designed to provide business customers and software developers with direct access to telecom services from public communications carriers, for the purpose of enabling them to design custom communications solutions integrated into existing services.

How BYOC has changed telecom for the better

More companies are adopting the bring-your-own-carrier model as a core component of their telecommunications strategy. In fact, this transition in enterprises throughout the business sector has arguably become a primary driver of evolution in the cloud-based telecom service market. The unprecedented increases in overall performance and control of telecom services with BYOC together account, to a large extent, for the increasingly broad appeal of BYOC.

Using the designated telephony coverage that comes bundled natively with your CPaaS, UCaaS or CCaaS solution certainly makes sense when you’re first migrating to the cloud. But once your usage starts growing, BYOC solutions give you a way to sidestep the cost, coverage, compliance, and quality limitations inherent in the bundled approach. BYOC delivers tangible benefits to operational efficiency, as well as administrative effectiveness and cost savings. These are some of the factors that are motivating businesses to undertake the upfront process of researching to identify and subscribe to their own choice of carrier.

As a result of the kinds of core functional advantages mentioned below, BYOC adoption is becoming a major industry force for the creation of new ways to help business customers distinguish between the competing telecom products and services. Some benefits of BYOC both for providers and their consumers include:

Greater agility

A business’s telephony needs can change rapidly. For example, companies often have sudden needs to add or drop various services, add new phone numbers, port existing numbers, enable a number at a new location, vision a number to a new location, etc. Working with your own chosen carrier directly allows for quicker changes. That means greater agility in managing and using telecom services with the BYOC arrangement.

Reduced telecom cost

Including telephone service plans in unified communications or contact center telecom solutions is convenient in the short run for business customers, but a premium cost is added for that convenience in the form of margin stacking. The more providers and resellers there are in the chain, the higher your costs are likely to get as each link in the chain adds a margin of its own switching to a BYOC alternative can reduce a company’s telecom expense, by allowing your chosen carrier to handle your telecom needs, while your tech provider continues taking care of your software and facilitation.

Maintenance costs are also likely to fall as you are dealing with a single provider, thus eradicating the long lead times for support and troubleshooting that are introduced when you deal with multiple upstream providers.

More administrative control

BYOC allows broader insights into your business telecommunications system and greater control over it. You get more transparency into how your telecom services are being used, such as monitoring the number of minutes used at a point in the billing cycle, how many phone numbers are in use, which numbers are being utilized and which are not, and more.

The BYOC option gives you direct control to make changes quickly as needed, instead of having to submit a helpdesk ticket through your unified communications or call center solution each time you need to make a change, port a number, etc.

No risk of service loss

Using a dedicated SIP trunking provider is also a good way to minimize the risk of coverage loss and service disruption that can come from using unknown and untrusted providers. By choosing a provider, you can ensure you’re dealing with one that is compliant with local regulations in the markets where you operate. Using bundled call plans, you have no visibility into who is actually providing the underlying telephony and what level of quality or compliance you’re getting. With most platforms employing least-cost routing between multiple providers, you’re also likely to see widely varying quality of service from country to country – another issue that BYOC is able to avoid.

No need to change numbers and carriers

When a business changes telecom service subscriptions from one provider to another, the BYOC option permits them to keep existing phone numbers and their carrier. The major convenience and business benefit of keeping the same phone number that is already established and widely associated with your company is a significant consideration when switching services as part of a move to new office locations, etc.
With BYOC, your number is not attached to a specific location. So, if your principal link to your SIP provider fails, or happens not to be where you need to use your telecom service at any given time, any internet connection enables linking with your SIP network.

Automation of existing telecom services

The growth of API adoption has evolved the global business telecom industry into a communications environment in which today’s enterprises are increasingly accustomed to having the power to automate various of their existing services.

You can use automated processes to engage in direct communications, gather business intelligence through contextual interactions, take advantage of the superior level of command that BYOC allows over call records, phone numbers, and other elements of modern business telecom service — all of which can help increase contact center productivity performance quality.

Programmable access to carrier-grade telecom resources

BYOC provides enterprises with internally programmable access to carrier-grade business communications resources, by enabling them to partner with cloud-based unified telecom services platform providers.

It also brings organizations and developers the advantage of unprecedented first-hand telecom systems control and extraordinary versatility in internally designing and deploying innovative approaches to service. These sophisticated internal capabilities allow companies to stay on the competitive edge, in order to meet their customers’ ever-changing needs.

Superior scalability

The flexibility to scale telecom services in order to meet changing market demands is one of the biggest benefits of cloud communications. BYOC can actually help you extend this capability beyond what is natively supported by your platform of choice. By using a SIP trunking provider’s coverage directly within your CPaaS, UCaaS, or CCaaS platform, you can essentially achieve instant access to all the markets where they offer coverage that your platform doesn’t support out of the box.

Learn more about the BYOC telephony model

Using BYOC means companies can respond to customers’ rapidly changing needs without being forced to switch their service providers or recreate strategies for the development or use of their tech systems, a major convenience and cost saver. Routing all communications through a single VoIP connection can save you significant amounts of your communications budget.

Adding its exciting abilities to generate new opportunities for organizations to customize their communications, easily scale their networks, and much more conveniently manage call volumes, it appears that the BYOC model will continue to deliver transformative change throughout the business communications sector.