I'm no plumber, but I imagine that the first company to introduce PVC pipes into the market did really well. Up until that point, houses and municipalities were fitted with much heavier cast iron, brass, or steel pipes. Compared to their metal counterparts, PVC pipes were easy to manufacture, transport, install, and they weren't susceptible to corrosion. In fact, many of the earliest installed PVC pipes are still in use nearly 90 years later.
These days, however, PVC pipes are pretty boring. How many potential home builders would even think to ask for them? I venture to say none. That's not because they aren't important -- they are. It's because we have come to expect them. We know that no house will be built without extensive use of them.
I've started to think of SIP trunks in the same way. Now, don't get me wrong. I am not about to recommend that we jettison IP telephony and return to the days of analog and digital. Far from it. It's more that SIP trunks are fast becoming as exciting as PVC pipes. The newness has worn off, and the functionally provided by basic SIP trunks is nothing to write home about.
Notice that I said basic SIP trunks. I am talking about raw bandwidth and a UDP connection that carries SIP requests, responses, and RTP (Real-Time Protocol) media. I should also add standard telephony features to that list – ANI, DNIS, DNIS manipulation, consultative and blind transfer, etc. Still, even with those extras, a basic SIP trunk gives you as much as you got with your ISDN trunks.
Personally, I am not a big fan of change for the sake of change. Why would you want to go through all the trouble of reconfiguring your network, investing in a PBX upgrade, training your IT staff, and buying a costly session border controller for the same functionality you already had? Trust me, SIP does not make dial-tone sound better. If you are going to go through the work of converting to SIP, you want something to show for it.
So, what is it that excites me about SIP trunks that has nothing to do with bandwidth, cents per minute, and the same old PSTN features I've had for years? Please allow me to explain.
Note: While the following points are geared toward the contact center space, I can think of many ways they would apply to knowledge worker calls, as well.
Fraud detection and prevention. Did you read my article about Pindrop Security? Some SIP carriers are using Pindrop and other security companies (e.g. TrustID) to deliver fraud detection in the cloud. Imagine how contact centers would benefit from weeding out fraudulent calls before they were queued up for agents. Imagine the cost savings gained from higher agent productivity and the stymieing of malicious callers.
Voice analytics. If you want callers to spend their valuable time calling you, don't you want them to have a good audio experience? This requires historical and real-time reporting that looks at quality-of-experience data and provides you with enough information to dynamically fix problems or do what's necessary to prevent them from happening in the future. While such technologies are certainly possible on premises, there are many cases when it makes sense to provide it back at the carrier.
ProsodicAnalytics. Along with the audio quality of the call, it's important to "listen" to what the callers are saying. By analyzing words, tones, inflections, and other aspects of speech, caller experience can be measured and real-time corrective measures applied as needed. For example, ProsodicAnalytics can detect angry callers and disrespectful agents. In these cases, contact center supervisors can be brought into problem calls to help alleviate potentially explosive situations. Again, providing this as a carrier cloud service may be the best fit for many organizations.
Cloud announcements. As I stated earlier, I want to keep as many unnecessary calls out of the contact center as possible. Agents and IVR ports are expensive resources, and I don't want to tie them up with unproductive calls. Cloud announcements can be an effective way of handling those calls at the carrier level.
For example, imagine you run the contact center for a power utility and your busiest times are during outage conditions. Having the ability to create and dynamically deploy cloud announcements informing callers that their problem is being dealt with keeps customer stats high and prevents agent overload.
Cloud Queuing. There are overload conditions that don't lend themselves to playing an announcement and releasing a caller. In these cases, you want to eventually deliver those calls to agents or an internal IVR, but your contact center solution isn't capable of handling these huge spikes in traffic. Queuing those calls in the cloud before sending them down the SIP trunk might be the ideal way of keeping your customers happy and your contact center out of the overload zone.
Cloud routing. One of the great benefits of SIP is the separation of a telephone number from a local calling area. This allows for routing options not possible with TDM trunks. For example, SIP allows numbers assigned to the Phoenix area to ring telephones in New York City.
In addition to geographic routing, enhanced SIP routing includes options for time-of-day, day-of-week, busy-no-answer, bandwidth overload, load balancing, holiday, call area selection, and alternate destination. Some carriers can even reach into an enterprise's contact center to facilitate advanced pre-call routing. There is no need to choose vanilla if your taste buds crave tutti-frutti.
Bandwidth management. Carriers are becoming more creative with how they deliver and manage bandwidth. Several offer Web interfaces that allow customers to dynamically grow and shrink the bandwidth utilization of their trunk circuits.
Future Proofing. The two most common audio codecs used on SIP trunks today, G.711 and G.729, have been around for decades. In fact, G.711 dates back to 1972. That was the year I entered high school, and I can assure you that a lot has happened since then.
As you plan your SIP future, it's important to understand the evolution of how we communicate. A codec developed before PCs, smart phones, and Skype may not be the best choice for tomorrow's technology. Some of the SIP carriers get that, and are adding support for wideband audio codecs such as Opus and G.722 (no spring chicken, either). They are also becoming open to video and its codecs -- H.264 and VP8/9.
Every enterprise is different, and their needs for SIP trunks are extremely varied. What is important to one IT or Contact Center director may be useless to another.
The point of this article was to show that SIP can be more than a simple replacement for TDM. Of course, there are still carriers willing to sell you a bare-bones SIP pipe if that's what you want. However, I will venture to say that more companies will choose functionality that only SIP can deliver.
Lastly, not all carriers are created equal. While some may offer you a plethora of advanced SIP services, others still live in the world of functional, yet ordinary PVC pipes. Like all things unified communications, do your homework, determine your particular needs, and choose wisely.
Andrew Prokop writes about all things unified communications on his popular blog, SIP Adventures.
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