The World of SIP Trunking!
When the word “telecommunications” comes to mind, we think of PSTN/POTS/Carrier grade switches. Big players like Nortel Networks, Ericsson, Lucent, and Alcatel are names that ring a bell.
Over the past couple of decades, these companies have become obsolete as new technologies now support a high volume of traffic and bandwidth, as well as faster connections. The market now demands that everything be faster, cheaper, and easy to design.
Many companies focused on building an alternative solution by designing voice over IP, aka VoIP. For many years different protocols were created to satisfy the VoIP community, mostly by protocol consortiums like H323 and SIP.
During quite a few years, H323 and SIP battled to be the standard protocol. H323 was developed by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) and SIP was developed by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). While each protocol has its pros and cons, SIP emerged as the preferred choice for the VoIP community because of its modularity, flexibility, and simplicity to deploy.
SIP was designed to provide a signaling and call setup protocol for IP-based communications. SIP also supports all features and processing functions present in the PSTN.
Who knew 20 years ago that SIP protocol would become the most popular protocol for the VoIP environment? It has revolutionized the way carriers and service providers interconnect with each other and has also changed the way we deploy services to our customers.
The challenge for customers with PBX-based solutions that rely on the PSTN, is that they are often under long-term contracts. Businesses can’t afford to change their on-premise voice infrastructure because it is expensive to do so. In some instances, it is also just too complicated to replace everything at one time.
BullsEye offers a SIP Trunk solution where customers don’t need to change their whole phone’s infrastructure and keep their current PBX with their existing TDM interface: T1 PRI.
The solution package provides a CPE, which translates the world of PSTN into the world of SIP. BullsEye deploys an Adtran 900 series (2nd generation and 3rd generation) that allows the customer to interconnect their T1 PRI interface in such a way that the Adtran device would transform the legacy voice path to SIP. There are many advantages to this solution one being that the customer keeps all the features and services in house in their local environment. Features like call transfer, voicemail, 3rd party call, and call on hold/retrieve are supported using their local infrastructure.
With SIP Trunk from BullsEye, the customer can expand to a rich enhanced solution where they can integrate Unified Communications and build multiple site solutions to avoid any single point of failure. One of the great advantages of an IP-based communications solutions is that there are no boundaries or limits to interconnecting the PBX with BullsEye.
What makes this even better? SIP Trunk supports a “middleman” CPE solution while also providing a direct peering interconnection with any IP-PBX.
Regardless of the solution with or without the CPE, the process needs to be seamless and effective for the customer. This could be potentially a great opportunity to offer BullsEye Telecom Hosted PBX solutions especially when PSTN PBX hits their End of Life or End of Maintenance terms.
With so much momentum around SIP Trunking, this solution is definitely here to stay. It provides clients a way to transition from legacy to newer digital products based on their schedule in a controlled and efficient manner.