Enterprise Considerations for Carrier Grade SIP Trunking

While reviewing SIP trunking prices in our company's newest report – "2020-2027 SIP Global Market 7-Year Forecast and Analysis –” I observed that two of the market providers charge $0.00833, and $0.0045 per minute, respectively, well within the price range of many competitors. That begs the question – are these deals merit-worthy of an IT manager chasing them down? I ask because after having surveyed thousands of SIP customers at the Eastern Management Group, I understand price is the number one customer driver of SIP trunking. But should it be?

Recently, I did a Google search on the term “SIP trunking price comparison,” which returned over 1.6 million results. Based on this unfathomable number, one must wonder what’s the right SIP trunk to buy if the price is king? With so many alternatives, it’s a gnarly question to solve, and I’d argue it’s the wrong one to dwell on.

Whatever drives an IT manager to purchase SIP trunking should tackle a specific problem relating to business-processes. These wrap around efforts like work from home, employee productivity, team collaboration, customer engagement, and business development – assuming this is what the enterprise needs, and the solution entails SIP trunking. But all SIP trunks are not equal, or even close, as I addressed in a previous No Jitter post about CPaaS provider, Plivo.

Carrier-Grade SIP Trunking Advantages
National and global enterprises with large and distributed customer bases, multiple offices, and work-from-home (WFH) employees, stand to benefit from carrier-grade SIP trunking. Advantages include maintaining control of call routing, extending coverage to more markets, assuring acceptable quality, and avoiding service interruptions due to compliance issues.

Unlike years ago, when SIP trunking was underdeveloped, public IP services are better suited for carrying latency-sensitive traffic like voice or video. The way providers route traffic is smarter, and peering relations are better.

For example, at IntelePeer, 98% of the company’s customers are running applications using public IP even though these customers have a private IP option. According to Intelisys, businesses should shy away from services that are meant to be over-subscribed that aggregate TCP traffic–regular data and non-voice traffic. However, there are SIP trunking rules-of-thumb for each enterprise to follow when referring back to the latest global market report.

Don’t rely on a single ISP from a circuit standpoint. Avoid all kinds of single-threaded access. Get links from either one or more tier one or tier two providers, running a protocol like a border gateway (BGP) to link them together. That way, you can suffer a primary link failure and still be talking to somebody on the call without it dropping.

Investigate Global Carriers
There must be interconnections with global tier one carriers to deliver high-quality voice calls with high availability and uptime. Be sure your provider has a redundant infrastructure across multiple geographies and at least three local carrier connections per country –redundant paths are there for failover and disaster recovery.

Global voice carriers, of which there are many, such as BICS, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, PCCW, Tata, and Telefonica, sell to enterprises; they also wholesale to carriers.

Apply a Point of Presence (POP)
Simply co-locating across two or three data centers isn’t enough for a global customer base. POPs are a better indicator. Check with your prospective provider to find out how many POPs are available for supporting large scale contact centers, and where they are relative to your customers. The cloud is getting crowded, and the result could be slow responses to internet activity. POP is the new culture among data centers, according to Rahi Systems.

Many providers have local hubs, POPs, in high internet usage areas to speed-up responses to internet queries.

Determine Customer Best Practices
Before implementing new SIP trunking - before finding the best price - planning and designing come first.

Follow these guidelines when executing a new plan:

• Decide on the call flows that are included in each phase of deployment; for example, inbound, outbound, long-distance, contact center, or general business calls.
• Evaluate SIP trunk features against your current time-division multiplexing (TDM) service and make sure you get all the features that are important to you.
• Look for a provider that owns the physical delivery medium (last mile) to your premises along with the service.

Follow these guidelines when generating a new design:

• Identify a global SIP provider that has scalability and can expand with the enterprise customer’s needs in any and every market in the world.
• Instead of buying from many regional SIP trunk providers, selecting one global SP may be better and easier for the enterprise.
• For redundancy reasons, consider having at least two SIP trunk entry points into your network.
• You’ll likely want a provider that can serve at least 50 countries with both SIP trunks and local, mobile, and toll-free numbers.

When your business is finally ready to buy, do a proof-of-concept trial before installing a SIP trunk into your production business network. Lastly, do proof-of-concept testing for all call flows critical to your business processes.

For more information about the Eastern Management Group reports Carrier-Grade SIP Trunking and “2020-2027 SIP Global Market 7-Year Forecast and Analysis” and or issues raised in this post, please ask our researchers or contact John Malone directly at 212-738-9402 Ext. 2201, or [email protected].