Two Types of SIP Providers

In my experience, I’ve come across two types of organizations who sell SIP service.

Provider 1

This is a traditional LEC or CLEC who offers SIP as a “me too” service—or in addition to their traditional analog lines, PRIs, Internet T1′s, MPLS, etc. Often they will require that you purchase their T1, provision 23 to 30 SIP trunks on it, and charge you the same as a standard PRI. Additionally, they can’t / won’t offer the additional flexibility of SIP trunks (porting numbers across calling areas, fail over, etc.) I haven’t seen very many of these products sold by agents or direct sales reps. It makes sense to me. Why sell an unknown (SIP) when you can sell the good old all mighty PRI? After all, there are no cost savings advantages. Note, this is me generalizing. It’s not the case with all SIP providers. In fact, I’ve recently worked with one that requires you to use their T1, but will offer the porting flexibility and cost savings benefits of SIP (.01/minute LD, 40+SIP trunks on the T1, etc).

No wonder less than 10% of businesses have moved over to SIP. It’s not because it doesn’t work, it’s because they don’t know about it! Your average telecommunications sales representative isn’t educating their customers.

Provider 2

The second type of SIP provider breaks the traditional mold of telecommunications providers. They can offer SIP trunks over your own bandwidth, can port and source numbers from most areas of the country, can provide fail-over, and are usually MUCH less than your traditional CLECs and LECs. [ read more ]

SIP Trunks Without an IP PBX

Can this be done? We’re doing it. By using third party equipment, we can terminate SIP trunks and convert back to traditional PRI signaling. This extends the benefits of SIP trunking to those that don’t want to upgrade their PBX yet.

Don’t get me wrong – if your organization needs to upgrade their phone system, but doesn’t have the money, by all means use the 40% – 70% SAVINGS associated with SIP trunks to justify the purchase. We’ll often wrap the phone system acquisition into a lease, convert the customer to SIP trunks, and still save the customer money AFTER the lease payment.

Sorry, back to converting SIP trunks to traditional connections…So far it works great. Depending on the scenario, it’s solved some other issues too. In our testing, we’ve realized that  this SIP conversion  equipment drastically speeds up the fail-over between two Internet connections. That’s because this equipment negotiates between the two Internet connections and reestablishes SIP trunking on the backup should the primary fail. In some cases, we were on a live call when we killed the primary Internet connection and didn’t drop the call! Other times we dropped the call but the SIP trunks were back up within seconds. Ask your traditional PRI provider to do that! [ read more ]