Ever since the arrival of SIP trunking, businesses have been gradually transitioning their PSTN connectivity services from legacy telecom connections to SIP. This is largely due to benefits SIP trunking brings over legacy connectivity.
SIP trunking is a dynamic and vibrant market, filled with many traditional wireline telecom providers and cloud-based communication platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) providers.
Simply stated, telecom providers own and operate local and/or long-distance telecommunications networks. These facilities-based providers manage the fiber optic transmission systems that connect a specific geographic region of our planet. In the U.S., they are also known by their former designations as interexchange carriers (IXC) and local exchange carriers (LEC).
CPaaS vendors offer a cloud platform that software developers use to add communications services to their own applications. For example, a click-to-call button in a mobile app might use a CPaaS service to complete the call for users and a two-factor authentication process in a website might use CPaaS to send an authorization code to users via SMS.
Both telecom and CPaaS providers can connect your business to the PSTN. Depending on an organization’s needs, a telecom provider may be a better fit than a CpaaS provider, or vice versa. This makes it worth your while to analyze the offerings carefully before making a decision.
So, how do you pick?
Businesses can apply different criteria for selecting their SIP trunking provider. At a very high level, here are three important considerations:
- Agility — the SIP trunking service should be fast enough to respond to changes in your businesses, since the time it takes to provision and scale a service can impact your business
- Cost — Complex pricing plans with contract lock-in causes most customers to pay for more than their actual usage. This siphons budget away from strategic projects. Understanding how a potential provider prices its SIP trunking offer is imperative.
- Global Reach — Global businesses must be able to provide consistent experience across all their locations, no matter where in the world they are. Using multiple regional PSTN providers can increase overhead and reduce security and reliability
