In case you missed Eric's post: Medtronic SIP Trunking Case Study: Part 2, pay close attention to what Jim Allen of Medtronic said, "Get comfortable with the risk." That pretty much sums up how I feel about my decision to cut the Verizon cords--thank you Jim!Are you comfortable with the risk? Let's explore a little further. PRIs are on a track of obsolescence simply because they cost too much and deliver too little on an old promise of ISDN. The Telcos previously cornered the market on DID numbers and companies paid dearly for service establishment and then ongoing costs to maintain and preserve numbers. The Telcos didn't make it easy to do business and instead made it expensive, timely and more complicated. That's what we call stagnation of services.
My business now depends upon one pipe and arguably I need a second, and we're not a large enterprise so a wireless gateway will suffice for our current needs and operations. Another marvel--think about this: one pipe providing our needs. Now this is something I'll praise the Telco (Verizon) for having done right and that's business FIOS. What they're doing to capitalize on the opportunity is establishing more rate plans and options to provide more bandwidth and features simply by making a phone call--click done. In a large enterprise environment, managing less pipes is a big deal and this resonates with everyone's boss's theme of "doing more with less."
The platform and carrier(s) of choice is something that you will live with. Ours is simple compared to yours. Our provider (ITSP) is Broadvox and their network has all the wonderful elements that we don't worry with--Session Border Control, softswitches (Legacy and Fusion) and geographic redundancy. Our failover is now AT&T GSM by way of a wireless gateway. Our telephony solution is a Panasonic NCP1000 that provides analog devices including fax, older proprietary phones including wireless GHz and DECT stations, IP and SIP phones, UC clients, door phone with live video/audio and ACD.
Still, we eventually will make other changes. Dump our ACD, move it to the cloud and integrate our iPhones as extensions. In short, I think that as a small business we can still continue to compress and move the shells around that will continue to decrease our costs, reduce our energy footprint and lighten the load of what hardware and software we decide to maintain ourselves. I'm less comfortable avoiding the challenges and continuing on par with no change because this path I think is much riskier than the road ahead.
There are plenty of challenges, maybe more for you in large enterprise, but there are numerous opportunities that remain unexplored, unlike the old days and ways. There's nothing new on the horizon of the PSTN unless you think of it as an infrastructure that once dominated the landscape, yet it will remain for some time as the backup for most, even primary for others. SIP trunking for us is a fair trade.
