Nowadays, traditional telecommunication operators are not the only way to connect your Business to clients from within and outside the country. There is a series of challenges coming with such operators among which are the significant costs of using traditional phone lines but also a lack of dynamic flexibility that would allow the business to instantly scale up or scale down the number of communication channels/ phone numbers used.
SIP Trunking
In this context, SIP trunking comes as an advantageous alternative by offering the possibility to carry such connections over the internet (typically, VoIP calls), which cuts costs significantly. Thus, contracting a SIP trunk service provider as compared to a traditional landline operator can normally save a business 60-80% of the money paid for telecommunications.
SIP is the abbreviation for Session Initiation Protocol, which in turn, can be of two kinds: SIP origination (allows receiving inbound calls) and SIP termination (allows initiating outbound calls). By contrast with traditional VoIP, SIP trunking can work without a computer being permanently turned on and thus, an infrastructure can be established that would offer an experience resembling very much that of using a landline phones if you not available Smartphones.
Benefits Of SIP Trunks Over Conventional Phone Lines
Other major advantages include:
● as stated, easy scalability is of paramount importance – regardless of the volume of distinct phone numbers needed (for varying numbers of employees in a different number of departments), SIP trunking services can meet these demands and can be adjusted almost instantly as compared to traditional landlines (which might even require infrastructure restructuration in this case).
● the same providers can also usually sell you toll-free numbers covering your country of residence or multiple other countries. Allowing your clients to call you for free is a great indicator of the resources and scope of the company and in the context of our times, it is even a must for a top company.
● On top of these, given that the connections are established via the internet, SIP trunking sessions come with the added benefit of supporting multimedia content: file sharing, video or audio streaming. Again, with the ubiquitous penetration of multimedia technologies and the impact it can have on productivity (e.g. videoconferences discussing slide presentations), this advantage seems to carry a lot of weight. Of course, these multimedia sessions can be run separately by using tools that ordinary people use (e.g. messaging or video chat applications like Skype, Viber). However, this may complicate the cooperation workflow given the need to create and maintain accounts for each of these tools but also the poor quality offered by such tools with regard to certain operations, such as the speed of file sharing (turns out it is a significant problem with Skype). Consequently, employees might need a combination of tools (Skype for video chat, Dropbox or Google Drive for file sharing, etc.).
Last but not least, manipulating sensitive data via a combination of such tools becomes progressively insecure (e.g. a large number of Dropbox accounts were hacked recently).
All these, speak for the necessity of using an integrated package of services such as that coming with SIP trunks.
All the above mentioned make SIP trunking seem like a useful upgrade for any business, which would turn up in significant financial savings but also in a significant boost in the capabilities and flexibility of its telecommunications.
