SIP trunking offers a number of clear benefits over other TDM connectivity choices, not the least of which include reducing business expenses.
It magnifies 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 businesses are now learned according to a recent Infonetics analyst's statement.
SIP on the Rise
Analyst Dian Myers recently looked out at the VoIP and UC field and made a few clear predictions about its future. Principally, Myers predicted that SIP trunking would make up the quickest growing segment of the VoIP market between now and 2017, a market expected to reach $82.7 billion by 2017 as well.
Where did Myers pull these lofty numbers from?
Well, to start, SIP trunking grew dramatically over last year, with the revenues seeing a big 83% spike in 2012 alone.
However, even with last year's massive growth its market still has a lot of room to grow. At the moment the tech only has a 15% penetration rate within North America's enterprise-level organizations. With 85% of the market still open to acquisition, and with technology's close ties to the accelerating Unified Communications and IP telephony markets, it seems pretty obvious how this tech will likely continue to climb high and fast over the next few years.
After all- SIP works best with UC and remote-hosted VoIP services, and these services represent the fastest growing segment of the overall burgeoning VoIP market (growing 17 percent year-over-year compared with 9 percent year-over-year in 2012).
What is SIP Trunking and How Does it Connect to Remote VoIP and UC?
The “SIP” in SIP trunking stands for “Session Initiation Protocol,” and all of this is just a fancy way of saying SIP trunking is capable of connecting a wide range of different communication devices using SIP protocol. SIP is used to easily connect different proxies, softphones, hardware phones, phone gateways, servers, PBX systems, video conference technologies, messaging and chat systems, or other mainstays of modern communication networks.
Basically, SIP trunking offers a fantastic connectivity choice for combining all of the different elements of modern UC and IP telephony systems.
Traditional TDM trunking tends to run data and voice transmissions over separate dedicated path structures, while VoIP trunks (whether they use SIP, MGCP or any other IP based protocol) lets both forms of transmission run over the same pathway. SIP trunking offered greater flexibility and resource management allowing to put more VoIP calls than other Voice over IP protocols such as H.323 which often had a tough time handling spikes in incoming call volume. While these systems worked OK during times when voice and data transmissions remained consistent, they didn't do so well at handling fluctuations in the information coming down one, or both, of these pathways.
SIP trunking and UC systems go together hand-in-glove, and if you're looking to adopt a UC or a hosted PBX system it's a wise idea to understand how SIP trunking works. This technology reduces costs and increases network flexibility.
