What is SIP Trunking?
For the uninitiated, one of the first questions a business person asks when told about sip trunks in Canada is ‘What is SIP trunking?’
It is simple really, think of SIP trunks as digital phone lines. Another way of looking at it SIP trunks is that they a service offered by an Internet Telephone Service Provider (ITSP) to use SIP protocol to enable communications between a PBX and the ITSP.
SIP trunks in Canada include multiple voice sessions (think phone calls) – as many as a business needs. While some see SIP Trunks as handling only voice traffic, the truth is that SIP trunks can also serve as the starting point for an entire world of realtime communications, including Instant Messaging, presence applications, shared white-boarding, application sharing and more.
Why SIP Trunking?
SIP trunking in Canada is an affordable, reliable and feature-rich alternative to traditional telephony networks and delivers several benefits:
- Eliminate costly PRIs, PSTN gateways and line cards as they are not required by SIP trunking
- Reduce growth costs as SIP trunking edge devices are more affordable ‘per line’ than equivalent PSTN devices
- Increase efficient use of bandwidth as SIP trunks and data leverage the same connection
- Maximum flexibility in dimensioning lines as you avoid having to buy capacity in chunks of 23 (PRI)
- Flexible termination of calls to preferred providers; calls to anywhere worldwide can be made for the cost of a local one
- Increase reliability and uptime with redundant, multiple SIP trunks service providersFaster deployment of SIP trunks and web-based administration
- SIP trunking allows Remote office and Multi-branch communications
SIP Trunking Quality
SIP trunking has had a wide adoption inside large enterprise for more than a decade and the early days of poor quality and dropped calls is long gone. The advent of cheap bandwidth and Quality of Service measures built into hardware has seen SIP trunks in Canada rival the reliability of the PSTN network.
Proper Quality of Service (QoS) measures for SIP trunks include: over provisioning of links, VLAN Tagging and prioritization of voice traffic. In fact, SIP trunks can be more reliable than the traditional PSTN as a number of failover solutions can be implemented. This is why IP Telephony is more of an IT function.
If you asked yourself ‘what is sip trunking?’ at the start, don’t worry you are not alone! While SIP trunks have been around and in enterprise use for over a decade – it is still not a widely used terminology, so the next time a colleague asks ‘what is SIP trunking?’ share what you learned here!
Sudden Communications: SIP Trunks Canada
Sudden Communications is a reliable provider of SIP trunks and SIP trunking services in BC and Ontario. We maintain peering arrangements with multiple Incumbent Telephone Carriers to offer a wide range of local access phone numbers with our SIP Trunks. Canada in general has an abundance of bandwidth which allows us to deliver a managed connection dedicated for SIP trunking based voice communications to ensure quality, reliability and uptime.
