To SIP or not to SIP?

By the year 2020, it has been claimed that carriers will be eliminating traditional ISDN PRI and other analog services moving to IP technologies. Not only are these solutions much less expensive for carriers to deliver, but they also provide a number of potential advantages to organizations as well. However, like any solution, it must be carefully planned to ensure the transition goes smoothly. Listed are some thoughts.

• Centralized vs. Distributed - Because telephone numbers do not have the same boundary restrictions as traditional services, customers can now centralize call flow minimizing the number of total trunks that may be required. Sites across the world can now share trunks and use statistics to determine the total number of lines that are needed for their enterprise. Centralized trunks capture the calls for all sites and then use their wide area network to distribute calls as required.
• Redundancy - Inbound calls can now have multiple entrance points into an enterprise with automatic fail over. So, if a facility within your organization is unavailable for any reason, inbound calls can automatically be rerouted to a secondary location so you do not miss a beat. These redundancy options can also be utilized for overflow should a primary location become saturated. Access
• Methods - Where organizations likely use multiple T1 access connections to provide the required capacity, SIP trunks can be delivered over fiber providing greater flexibility. In the past, if you needed 25 trunks, a second T1 was required. With SIP and fiber, you can easily just add trunks as needed.
• Shared Bandwidth - Most carriers allow you to share required SIP bandwidth with other mediums such as data and/or Internet. It is important to ensure that the voice traffic takes the highest priority to maintain superior voice quality, but you can often increase other bandwidth and share the cost between applications. 
• Cost Savings - Although there can be other soft savings as described earlier, cost savings is still one of the driving factors for customers. In our experience with this technology, customers have saved 5 to 60% each month by moving to this technology.

The combination of cost savings and the other benefits has made SIP solutions very attractive for organizations. Bigger, faster and less expensive is often an easy sell. However, the needs of every organization are different.