Your Business Before and After Installing an SIP Trunk

A business looking to upgrade from PSTN has two alternatives for VoIP. You can either purchase hosted services from an external provider or deploy your own SIP trunks. Conventional wisdom was that small businesses should choose hosted VoIP services while larger companies can deploy their own SIP trunks. This was largely because deploying SIP trunks to a custom configuration was a lot more work than purchasing VoIP services.

However things have been changing in the SIP trunking business. Nowadays it is just as easy to install SIP trunks as purchasing hosted services. Competition has encouraged providers to simplify their offering and expand their service portfolio. Now the decision of choosing between SIP trunks and hosted VoIP no longer depends on the size of your business. You can choose the best alternative that fits your requirements for now and in the future.

So what can you expect to get from installing your own SIP trunks? The truth is that upgrading to VoIP can significantly alter the way your business works. Apart from significant cost savings, you will see productivity improvements from the get go and the benefits continue to accumulate as time goes on. Let us take a look at how your business can change with the installation of SIP trunks.

Fewer Constraints on Internal and External Calls

Traditional PSTN calls can get pretty expensive particularly if you have a lot of long-distance or international business relationships. Even a profitable company will have a budget for various categories including phone calls. Employees generally have to be careful not to exceed a certain amount for their phone calls every month. This puts a certain strain on making international calls. Your workers may tend to cut short conversations or avoid making such calls at the end of the month.

With SIP trunks however, the cost of long-distance or international calling falls dramatically. For all intents and purposes, all calls become local calls. Since VoIP calls travel over data networks, they don’t touch the PSTN for the majority of their journey across the world. Your employees no longer need to think twice about making long-distance calls. With SIP trunks, calls between employees within the organization also become free. It doesn’t matter whether they are sitting in the head office or branches scattered around the country. You’ll find that your employees are more productive when they don’t have to count every penny spent on phone calls.

Ad Hoc Versus Integrated Communication

Take a good look at your organization’s communication systems at present. Chances are you have a bunch of PRI lines and a traditional PBX system for voice calling. Those lines are dedicated to calls and cannot be used for anything else even if you have excess capacity. You may have a different system for conference calling and a plug-in for video chat. Your employees may be using multiple different instant messaging applications for communicating with each other. Such ad hoc systems take time and effort to maintain and do not present a cohesive user experience for your employees.

Once you deploy SIP trunks within your organization, all that will change. SIP trunks are used for voice calling, video chat, conference calling, multimedia sessions as well as instant messaging. The only limit on what you can do is the available bandwidth and capacity of your network. SIP trunks serve as the foundation for Unified Communication suites as well.

Enhance Flexibility and Economies of Scale

Making changes in a conventional enterprise phone system is an arduous and complicated task. Configuration and setup require the services of an IT team or technicians. Users cannot just enable or disable features that they need at a particular time. PRI lines come in bundles of 23. If you need 25 channels, then you need to get a second PRI line and pay for capacity that is lying unused. In general, such systems are inflexible and rigid.

SIP trunks offer flexibility and economies of scale. You only pay for the resources you use and not a penny more. If you don’t need a line, simply remove it and add it back later. There is no delay or extra payment for such flexibility. Modifying and configuring your setup is also dead simple. Everything is accessible through an online dashboard and changes don’t need technical expertise. Users are able to access their account information and settings with their own credentials. You can disable and enable features on a per user or per group basis at any time.

These changes may appear to be small on their own but they quickly add up to a more productive and efficient workforce. Not only does your business save money by switching to SIP trunks but your employees can get more done in the same time. You’ll be amazed at the changes in your business after installing SIP trunks!