SIP trunking offers a number of clear benefits over other TDM connectivity options, including reduced business expenses.
It increases many of the benefits we associate with IP telephony and unified communications in general, making it a great choice when you’re upgrading your premise-based communication systems, as many companies know according to a recent analyst statement. from Infonetics.
SIPs on the rise
Analyst Dian Myers recently took a look at the field of VoIP and UC and made some clear predictions about its future. Primarily, Myers predicted that SIP trunking would constitute the fastest growing segment of the VoIP market between now and 2017, a market that is also expected to reach $82.7 billion by 2017.
Where did Myers get these high numbers?
Well, for starters, SIP trunking has grown dramatically over the past year, and revenue has seen a huge 83% increase in 2012 alone.
However, even with the massive growth of the past year, its market still has plenty of room to grow. At the moment, the technology only has a 15% penetration rate within North American enterprise-level organizations. With 85% of the market still open for acquisition, and with the technology’s close ties to the fast-paced markets of unified communications and IP telephony, it seems pretty obvious that this technology will likely continue to scale high and fast in the coming years.
After all, SIP works best with UC and remotely hosted VoIP services, and these services represent the fastest growing segment of the burgeoning global VoIP market (growing 17% year-over-year compared to 9% year after year in 2012).
What is SIP Trunking and how does it connect to remote VoIP and UC?
The “SIP” in SIP trunk stands for “Session Initiation Protocol”, and this is all just a fancy way of saying that SIP trunk is capable of connecting a wide range of different communication devices using the SIP protocol. SIP is used to easily connect different proxies, softphones, hardware phones, telephone gateways, servers, PBX systems, video conferencing technologies, messaging and chat systems, or other building blocks of modern communication networks.
Basically, SIP trunking offers a fantastic connectivity option to combine all the different elements of modern UC and IP telephony systems.
Traditional TDM trunking tends to run voice and data transmissions over separate dedicated path structures, while VoIP trunking (whether using SIP, MGCP, or any other IP-based protocol) allows both forms of transmission run on the same path. SIP trunking offered greater flexibility and resource management, allowing more VoIP calls to be made than other Voice over IP protocols, such as H.323, which often struggled to handle spikes in incoming call volume. While these systems worked well during times when voice and data transmissions remained constant, they did not do as well in handling fluctuations in information coming through one or both paths.
SIP and UC trunking systems go hand in hand, and if you’re looking to adopt a UC or hosted PBX system, it’s a good idea to understand how SIP trunking works. This technology reduces costs and increases network flexibility.