SIP trunking, VoIP, and trunking centralization can reduce traditional enterprise telecom bills by 75%, not only because of VoIP technology, but also because of the change in the telecom tariffs involved. Let's look at all the ways that VoIP/SIP can reduce traditional telecom costs.1. Eliminate Intrastate Toll--Calling between LATAs within a state is usually 4-5 cents a minute vs. interstate calling at 1-2 cents a minute. Yes, when calling from Houston to Dallas Texas, it is cheaper if the call goes through a data center out of state. This applies for both Toll Free and Long Distance calls.
2. Fixed Rate Billing--40% of the phone bill is the phone bill. Enterprises have entire departments that sort through a telephone bill to validate it and then charge back the various business units. With SIP trunks, an enterprise can pay for a fixed access and peak concurrent call rate, similar to Internet or MPLS billing.
3. Eliminate Local Usage--Within a lot of LATAs, the LEC will charge a per minute rate for usage based on bands (distance within the LATA between callers).
4. Eliminated Advance Features--PRI D channel and toll free features such as transferring a toll free call from one site to another.
5. Economies of Scale--Aggregating all the trunking requirements for an enterprise into a few data centers can reduce the number of trunks required by 40-60% and cut the cost of access by 80%. Four, 100Mbps Ethernet connections are a lot cheaper than 200 T1s.
6. Reduce 3rd Party Audio Conferencing--Most enterprises that use a 3rd party to host their audio conferencing service could cut their costs by 25% by using a standard LD number from an office vs. offering a toll free number. A toll free outbound call must ride over a LEC circuit vs. one from an IXC. IXC trunks are typically half of a LEC trunk, plus if you define the service provider as being on-net, the LD costs go down further. Of course, moving to VoIP/SIP will further drive down the cost.
7. Competition--With multiple carriers into a few data centers, an enterprise can easily move traffic between service providers. Local SIP trunks are typically half the cost of existing TDM T1/PRI trunks, plus they will include up to 1,000 minutes/month of free long distance.
Yes, to centralize all voice through the data center and run VoIP across a company's private WAN requires an investment in the WAN to handle the additional high priority bandwidth for voice. Typically, the cost comes out to about half cent a minute which is 50-80% cheaper than traditional voice network. To further these savings, collapsing the video conferencing network onto the WAN is another opportunity, along with using an adaptive codec that offers great quality voice normally but can dynamically adapt if bandwidth becomes limited.
For an enterprise to fully understand their opportunity, they should talk to their incumbent provider's competition. What is that Pink Floyd song singing about the gravy train???
