What’s all the excitement about SIP Trunking?
You’ve probably heard of it – Session Initiation Protocol Trunking or SIP Trunking for short.
Let’s take a look at what SIP Trunking is and how it can help businesses like yours with telephony needs.
What is SIP Trunking?
SIP Trunking is a telephony product that uses the internet to create a replicated (or virtual) phone line that runs over IP.
Centralize and Save
SIP Trunking allows you to centralize your telephone network to a single location; creating substantial savings for your business – regardless of how many sites your company has.
In fact, the more locations you have, the greater your savings will be!
With your hardware situated in one location, you can integrate new sites faster and more efficiently instead of setting up a new phone system every time you set up a new location.
On the opposite spectrum, your organization can easily sustain its presence in multiple locations, even if your company only has one site. This allows you to broaden your national scope while keeping long distance charges at an affordable rate. Your business can select local phone numbers in over 1,000 cities across Canada!
How does it differ from using a Regular Phone System?
Traditional analog phone systems utilize cumbersome phone lines and are physically limited to the amount of existing lines.
If you have 8 analog phone lines and all 8 are in use, then incoming phone calls from clients will be answered with a busy signal – leaving your customers feeling like they’re trying to win a prize package from the local radio station.
With SIP Trunking, this wouldn’t be an issue because those physical lines do not exist.
Did you know that most businesses relying on a traditional analog phone system pay for up to 50% more lines than they need – just to be safe?
With SIP Trunking there are no physical phone lines coming into the building. This gives you the ability to add and remove phone lines on a daily basis without the hassle of traditional installation.
Your phone system will be almost endlessly scalable and can be adjusted based on the number of locations you have (or even by your call history and usage).
For example, one day you are getting larger than normal call volume. You have 8 lines and they’re all in use; every missed phone call is a missed opportunity. SIP Trunking allows you to exceed those 8 lines.
You simply ask your provider to bill you based on the number of times you “go over” your requested phone lines, and a temporary phone line will be added for the following 24 hours.
This is called bursting.
How Bursting Works
You are able to select the number of channels (phone lines) that you require to operate simultaneously. But what happens if all of those lines are being used?
In addition to those channels you can set up your “true maximum call volume” by allowing a certain number of bursting channels.
The number of bursting channels can be up to 100% of your committed channels (8 committed channels + 8 bursting channels = 16 channels MAX). This means when a customer calls they will never get a busy signal – even if all of your phone lines are in use – and at the end of the month you pay for only what you needed.
