This week I attended Telecom 2014, an annual conference organized by Neotelis and held in Toronto for telecom, IT and contact centre management professionals. It is a 2 day event, with the first day focused on vendor products and services. On the second day there are a number of presentations by telecom industry consultants. This is a good opportunity for medium to large-sized organizations to learn about what service and solution providers, and to a lesser extent, equipment vendors have to offer. Presenters included Allstream, Avaya, Bell, Cisco, Microsoft, Mitel, Primus, Rogers and Shoretel among others.
SIP and unified communications have been slow to be adopted by medium to large-sized businesses in Canada. In Allstream’s presentation they indicated that SIP trunking, which is in effect an IP replacement for traditional PRI’s, is 5 times larger in the US than in Canada on a relative basis. It is not that SIP is not widely available. In Allstream’s case they indicated that they can cover over 90+ percent of all businesses in Canada. Bell Canada has had a SIP trunking offering for years. However there is likely little advantage to marketing it widely since it is likely to result in lower revenue and margins for Bell from existing subscribers to PRI services. The same would apply for TELUS in BC and Alberta. However, in a competitive situation where the business is at risk, you might find the telecom incumbents responsive to your needs.
What is SIP Trunking?
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking is the use of voice over IP (VoIP) to facilitate the connection of a private branch exchange (PBX) to the Internet. The SIP trunk connects an organization’s PBX to an Internet Telephony Service provider (ITSP). The ITSP delivers the connectivity for the customer to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). In effect, the Internet replaces conventional telephone trunks and it permits the ability to combine data, voice and video in a single line, eliminating the need for separate physical trunks or lines for each mode. The result is reduced overall cost and enhanced reliability for multimedia services.
How Does SIP Trunking Help You Save Money?
If you have a single location with a PBX, rather than buying a full PRI of 23 channels for your voice service, you can buy fewer SIP channels based on your actual need. In addition, you can quickly augment or decrement the service from most service providers by a single channel at a time. If you have multiple sites, you can reduce or eliminate the need for PRI’s, PBX’s and gateways at each location. In aggregating the channel requirements you also get more efficiency and should require fewer channels. Eliminating PBX’s should result in reduced costs for maintenance and installation and support of PBX hardware. Long distance savings realized by your service provider are often passed on to customers with flat rate calling.
How do you Choose a Service Provider?
First of all there are a number of service providers that can offer SIP trunking service in Canada. Bell, TELUS, Allstream offer the service. In addition there are a myriad of other service providers including ThinkTel, Primus, Iristel, BroadConnect, Comwave, BabyTEL and ISP Telecom that can offer the service across Canada. If you are considering a SIP trunking service, my recommendation would be to make sure that you consider including some of these companies in your evaluation process. In many cases you may find these service providers offer flexible solutions in terms of pricing and simplified user based provisioning and reporting. At Telecom 2014, I was impressed with the ThinkTel presentation in this regard as well as their ability to offer burstable capacity resulting in the need for fewer channels for most of your usage.
If you need voice Quality of Service guarantees, your choices are more limited but would include Allstream and Bell for MPLS. There is a debate as to whether you need MPLS and it is influenced by your specific needs. MPLS will certainly cost you more but may still be very attractive relative to traditional voice costs and these providers will typically deliver a fully managed end to end service. Carrier grade ethernet with voice Quality of Service is typically more cost-effective than MPLS and many providers will offer service level guarantees for their offerings. If you do not have the time, resources or experience to consider SIP trunking alternatives to achieve savings, consider engaging a telecom consultant to assist you in the process.
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