Cisco SIP Trunk is a Great Reason for Having a Cisco Phone System
There is a great new technology that is used to bring phone calls into a business telephone system that gives lower monthly bills and a better level of reliability. It is called a Cisco SIP trunk, and it is worth looking at ways it can benefit your business. The only catch is that your organization has to be using a VoIP telephone system in order to gain all the benefits, however, in many cases the monthly cost savings from converting to a Cisco SIP trunk with a Cisco VoIP telephone system can pay for all of the costs to upgrade to a Voice over IP telephone system!
Most organizations that have more than fifty phone users have a kind of business telephone system called a Private Branch eXchange, or PBX. This system lets users call each other quickly, and to share the circuits that are provided by the telephone company for outside calls. The circuit that connects the organization to the phone company is most often a type of voice T1 called an ISDN PRI, which can have 23 concurrent calls on it, and costs typically $600/month. A T1 can also be used for other reasons, like data connections in the form of Internet or a private Wide Area Network such as MPLS. Because all organization locations require voice service as well as data service, most typically have multiple T1 connections coming into each of their sites. A Cisco phone system can work with traditional voice T1’s as well as a SIP trunk, making the changeover very straightforward.
One of the large benefits of SIP trunking is cost savings. For example, a business that has 10 locations, each with a voice T1 and an Internet data T1, can reduce their costs enormously. An Internet T1 is about $600/month, whereas an MPLS T1 costs less at about $450/month. It is possible to reduce a $12,000/month data and voice circuit cost to about $7000/month by putting in place SIP trunking and an MPLS private network in place of voice T1’s and Internet T1’s. This gives $5000 extra per month that can be used to fund the purchase of equipment and installation services for a VoIP phone system. If the telephone system is financed over a 3 year period, that provides a total budget of about $180,000 for a new phone system.
There are additional cost savings from circuit consolidation. SIP trunking is often used to consolidate unused circuit channels from the telephone company. With traditional voice T1 circuits, If a location requires that more than 23 concurrent calls be completed, a second T1 has to be added, bringing the total circuit capacity to 46 concurrent calls. The higher capacity is only useful for that location. It is very different with SIP trunking; in most situations the SIP trunk is priced for aggregate concurrent calls for the entire organization, which means utilization is higher and monthly costs lower.
An additional advantage of SIP trunking is reliability. The SIP trunk phone calls are sent over a data network to a voice gateway that can terminate the SIP call. It is over an IP connection. If the first location the call is sent to is not available, then a second and possibly third location can receive the call. That means if a remote office location is not reachable due to power outage or natural disaster, the calls can still be sent to someone on the phone system who is reachable. This allows the organization to continue to provide customer service to the caller and not merely give a busy signal, which is what the caller would receive if the call was directed to a voice T1 connected to a PBX that was turned off.
Just like any newer technology, there are many details that have to be taken care of in a SIP trunk deployment. When it is combined with a phone system replacement, there are more details and potential issues. For most organizations, the cost savings, better availability and enhanced productivity from a new telephone system make it a worthwhile conversion. SIP trunking combined with a Voice over IP phone system is a project that should be on every organization’s plans.
Related Posts
Filed under VoIP Office Solutions by on Aug 31st, 2011. 
Leave a Comment