SIP Trunks and UC: Take Another Look
There’s a saying that some people are such experts in their field that they forgot more than everyone else will ever know. That must be the case with Marty Parker’s recent comments on No Jitter regarding UC and SIP Trunks (see ” SIP Trunks: Least Cost Routing, not a Route to UC“).
In at his remarks, Marty reminds us that SIP Trunks are primarily used now to connect SIP-enabled customer sites to connect to the PSTN for voice calls. That’s a fair statement of where we are today, because roughly 80-85% of the calls that a company makes or receives are offnet - to or from other companies who don’t use the same provider, or the same technology from the same provider, for voice calls. He’s absolutely right when he says that providers’ SIP Trunk services are not needed for intra-company UC when those people and locations are connected by QoS-enabled MPLS or Ethernet. He also lobs the Internet into this mix, but the ongoing performance of internet-based communications are less predictable - some people and companies think the low price is a fair performance tradeoff, some don’t. It all depends on (1) what you need to do, and (2) the available alternatives.
But Marty must have forgotten a few things that are important to recall:
- As Eric Krapf points out, don’t write off voice, it will always be with us. And there will be a lot of voice traffic out there for years to come (see “Are SIP Trunks Strategic?“).
- Many providers are offering cloud services that require SIP Trunk interfaces. These include hosted contact center and contact center as a service offers (voice, IM, chat, etc.), hosted IP audioconferences, hosted IP PBXs and UcaaS, hosted SIP videoconferencing services. Over time, more will follow. The economic “recovery” is going to be prolonged. Given tight capex and opex budgets, and lack of plentiful resident SIP/UC expertise, it’s likely that a growing number of companies will seriously consider using managed, hosted and cloud-based SIP services (vs. buying all their UC systems).
- Not all companies want to employ a centralized architecture that uses MPLS or Ethernet services for inter-location real-time communications. SIP Trunks are a secure, enterprise-grade alternative.
- Many companies would like to engage in highly secure, enterprise-grade inter-company UC. They can’t do that today easily, because most domestic MPLS and Ethernet services are ‘islands’-Company A is on carrier 1’s MPLS service, Company B is on Carrier 2’s, and the two MPLS networks don’t interconnect. At all. This is one of the reasons that initiatives like the recently-announced Open Visual Communications Consortium (OVCC) have been formed-to interconnect multi-carrier, multi-vendor videoconferences using SIP “bridges” and QoS-enabled WANs. To get there, you’ll need SIP Trunk services from a partner service provider. As will other companies.
- As alluded to above, SIP just isn’t about voice, nor are SIP Trunks. The protocol performs session control for all real time IP communications. And use of real time non-voice applications is growing like weeds, which Marty points out.
Are SIP Trunks strategic? That’s not nearly as important a question as (1) what can UC do for your company, and (2) what does your company plan to do with UC? In many cases, in order to enjoy the full fruits of UC, many companies will find that SIP Trunks are an absolute necessity.
Lisa,
Whether SIP trunking is “strategic” or “tactical” is a good question. However, your last paragraph highlights the need to do UC planning before trying to do infrastructure planning.
As you point out, organizations need to identify high-value business processes that can benefit the most from UC flexibility, along with identifying specific end users, both inside and outside of the organization, that will need UC accessibility. (I see mobile users as being the biggest targets for UC support, not just desktop users.)
As I discuss in my blog below, the real challenge for identifying the “who” and the “how” of UC implementation planning is having tools to quantify business process problems. We need better analytics to help business management set their priorities for selective UC implementations.
Hello,
This is a very good discussion and I agree with Art. We have recently launched a Hosted IP Telephony solution that will allow SMB customers to begin to integrate business processes and communication technology. What we are finding in our market is that SMB are still thinking of their communications systems in traditional ways. But we are finding their is a definite interest in hosted communications solutions and an increasing awareness of UC solutions. SIP trunks will become increasingly important for customers as they seek to leverage technology to improve productivity.