Every business sector is highly competitive and no organisation can afford to stand still. Adaptation is a necessity, not just for your business processes, but for the technology and infrastructure which power those processes. Nowhere is this more true than in telecommunications.
For many years, the mainstay of business telecommunications has been ISDN lines delivered by one of the traditional carriers. However, even the traditional carriers are moving away from ISDN and embracing Voice Over IP for their future network plans--and many are embracing SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) as the VoIP technology of choice. If the carriers are moving away from ISDN, then it follows that businesses large and small must do so as well.
If your organisation is still using ISDN, not only is your telecom solution well down the road towards obsolescence, it very likely is stifling innovation and reducing your company's efficiency and competitiveness. SIP offers businesses many benefits over traditional ISDN. These include:
Speed of deployment:
ISDN requires a physical line from the carrier be installed. Lead times on a physical circuit are under the best of conditions 30 to 45 days, and sometimes can go longer. Lead times for a SIP trunking solution can be measured in hours, or perhaps a few days, depending on the size and complexity of the requirements.
One ISDN PRI line supports at most 23 concurrent phone calls. If that line is full, a new physical line must be installed (with the same 30 to 45 day lead time). Once SIP is in place, additional trunks can also be added much more quickly in order to meet increased demand at peak times--at Voice The Right Way, we can increase a client's SIP trunk capacity with literally just a few key strokes.
Flexibility
SIP utilizes your company's data networks, including its Internet connection. Even if a particular solution makes a business case for a dedicated data connection, it is still fundamentally an Internet connection, and can be shared with other applications. ISDN channels are for phone calls only.
As a result of this transport-neutral aspect, SIP trunks can be immediately deployed wherever you need them. Voice The Right Way customers generally see no configuration change with us when they relocate their offices or change Internet providers. With ISDN, an office move involves ordering of new physical lines for the new location, and coordinating the transfer of services from one set of lines to the other.
Moreover, telephone numbers provided with ISDN are, in the main, geographically defined--unless you pay extra. With SIP trunking, there is no mandatory linkage between where you are and which telephone numbers you use; one set of phone numbers can be shared among multiple sites, or a single site can have phone numbers from multiple localities. Voice The Right Way customers often have phone numbers in multiple localities--and can even obtain international numbers to build an overseas presence.
Scalability
With SIP trunking, your phone system can grow as your organisation grows. It’s easy to increase the number of lines you require and simple to extend your company phone system to new offices.
Seasonality
Many businesses have peaks and troughs throughout the year when it comes call volume. A target sales or marketing campaign also can cause a temporary increase in call volume. ISDN is not rarely either the most flexible or cost-effective option to deal with this type of demand. Even if you can increase the number of ISDN lines to meet the demand, you are left paying for unused channels when demand falls. SIP trunking enables organisations to adjust capacity based on actual need, not transient peak loads. Simply put, with SIP trunking, you pay for what you use, not what you rent.
Resilience and Reliability
What would happen if your phone system failed, or there was a disaster at one of your sites? ISDN is vulnerable to a single point of failure – if ISDN lines go down, implementing call forwarding and rerouting of numbers can take hours--assuming the carrier even provides the option--and it is a costly exercise. Meanwhile, your customers, suppliers and contacts would be unable to reach you, leading to frustration at the very least. The inability to conduct business in the meantime is extremely costly--lost revenue is always by far the largest cost of downtime.
SIP trunking has no such limitations. Again, the transport-neutral aspect means SIP trunks can be provisioned to offer automatic call rerouting to other sites and over additional lines, seamlessly and automatically. Whether the outage is a simple power outage or a catastrophic disaster forcing a temporary office closure, SIP trunks can seamlessly reroute to alternate destinations. At Voice The Right Way, such rollover options are part of our basic service, not a costly add-on, which means a robust disaster recovery plan becomes part of your standard service.
Cost-Effective Quality
SIP trunks can deliver enterprise-grade voice services over your existing data network and Internet connection, or can use a dedicated data connection when the business use can call volume warrant. Most commonly, businesses are able to combine Internet/data and VoIP telecommunications bandwidth on a single set of circuits, resulting in more efficient use of those circuits--with corresponding cost savings--without sacrificing call quality.
These benefits of modern VoIP telecommunications and SIP trunking are what are driving both carriers and businesses to transition away from ISDN lines. Compared to yesterday's ISDN lines, leveraging SIP Trunking means that your organisation is able to enhance customer communications, which elevates the quality of service you can offer. This gives competitive advantage to companies using VoIP and places companies still using ISDN lines at a disadvantage.
Which group do you want to be in?