It's been over a year since I moved my office voice service over to all SIP trunks and said goodbye to an old era. Now I can report back on the new era experience and what it may mean for businesses and to those supporting the move over to SIP trunks.
Not long after cutting over I decided to move a back office line over to SIP too. My attitude is, better to put that money in my pocket than Verizon's. So the savings went up to about 43%. Originally when Verizon FIOS was initially deployed, customers complained that they could not just buy FIOS for Internet. We migrated out of Verizon voice provided via our FIOS service, and the bill stayed static until this year after receiving a notice from Verizon that our old FIOS pricing was no longer available. We upgraded our FIOS service to 15/5 Mbps.
We recently gave up the back office service and converted the number to a virtual DID with our provider. We carried a redundant service for a year and then we issued a disconnect request to the SIP provider and they acted like a phone company. The simple disconnect request was issued to them on February 2nd and it was completed on February 28th. After the upgrade and deletion of service, our monthly savings now rings in at 36%.
Any erosion of benefits would occur from too many issues and service-affecting outages that cause a company's calls to overflow to more expensive facilities or that results in loss of revenue directly attributed to the outage(s). I really can't say we've experienced this.
Voice traffic is not our top tier usage as far as bandwidth goes, and this as an admission softens the urgency of voice--at least you would think. As a business owner I’ll say, "voice is still crucial to our business because we are a service business." However you do look at voice you need to have a clear objective in mind, and ours was simply cost.
During the year, two problems did surface that we've experienced with our test trunks from 2009 and when our new service cutover in 2010. First is fear of talking for long durations--we conduct long support calls and even Webex sessions to a conference bridge and sometimes the call quality heads south after being on the call for extended periods, usually longer than 60 minutes. In only one instance did we have to hang up completely and reinitiate a new call.
What I discovered next is our IP-PBX "sensitivity" to the NOC's changes and maintenance during the off hours. An alarm light mapped to my phone shows loss of service during early morning hours. The NOC manager confirmed the dates/times from our IP-PBX log. Call this an anomaly. Only once during 2010 did we have a provider service-affecting issue and that was on December 31st and yes, I was in and working. The outage lasted just a few minutes. My guess is something had to be done during the day to allow the NOC crew to party at midnight. This year we had another outage again lasting minutes and it was the first one during business hours.
Other than those two issues, I haven't been playing Packet Man to trace packets. We did that in the past, with our buddies at ADTRAN proving the problem to the provider, but there was no accountability. Meaning, we have retail service, and how much of my time do I spend haggling over pennies when the provider came back with "we couldn’t match the call records." Still, rolling the truck for no dial tone vs. an insignificant number of calls with quality issues has a trade off. Rolling the truck costs money, and issues with copper lines could be equipment related. Minor issues with SIP trunks (call quality)--if they are an insignificant number--just don’t warrant a lot of attention. For SMBs this becomes an upfront question of, "Are you willing to tradeoff quality for cost?" I think this is relevant and unless customer expectations are geared for this, then there will be some backlash. How much time are vendors willing to spend chasing these issues for customers? Still, given the few incidents that were provider related, the tradeoff of quality for cost savings was worth the effort.
