How to Find the Right Sip Trunk Provider That Meets Your Needs?

Voice over Internet Protocol is getting popular day by day and the streaming is based on SIP (Session Initiation Protocol).

What Is SIP Trunking?

It is a method in which phone systems operate using a good speed internet connection instead of going through the route of the traditional phone line. This facility is provided by SIP trunk providers.

Benefits of SIP Trunking

• It costs less and thus you save money on your business phone. Sometimes, the cost gets 60-80% less than normal phones.
• Scaling the operation is a very easy and painless job.
• Here the service is much more reliable than the conventional method of calling.

SIP trunks have become very common. In the past few years, every major telephony carrier along with smaller and regional players is providing enterprise trunking. But, before going for enterprise SIP trunk, one should know how to find the right sip trunk provider that aligns well with your needs.

Reach

It is extremely important that the provider has SIP trunks in all locations that your enterprise requires. If your company reach is in multiple geographies across continents, then you should look if the service provider you are zeroing in has both the TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) and SIP trunks. This helps in porting the numbers between the two technologies.

Quality of Service

The quality of call needs to be good and thus you should always ask for the Quality of Service (QoS) metrics beforehand from the provider. This will help you in figuring out if the latency, jitter, and packet loss are what you can tolerate or not. You can compare the metrics provided by the service provider to the norms for a decent voice quality, which are a one-way latency of not more than 150ms, less than 1% of Packet loss and the one-way jitter at an average of 30ms.

Codec Choices

This depends on your requirement, but most providers support G.711 and G.729. If your enterprise need is also of fax then you will require wideband, which is G.722 or T.38. Thus, ask the service provider if it supports all codec that you require on ingress and egress.

Encryption

As of now, no provider supports the encryption of SIP signalling TLS (Transport Layer Security).  Thus, if you are using it you need to decrypt it before it is sent on the SIP trunk. The carrier, however, may support media encryption SRTP (Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol) until the time they are not required to decrypt it.

Apart from these, there are few other considerations, including the charges that a service provider will take. After going through all these closely, you should decide on the most suitable service provider for your enterprise.