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Deployment of SIP trunks.
Here are two contrasting experiences and views from resellers on the deployment of SIP trunks. Both are however still selling SIP trunk solutions.
Jed Marson, Director, Electric Broom Limited says early adoption of technology is never without its fun and games. "In 2006 I went 'SIP trunk'. The supplier couldn't produce a bill, went bust, was picked up by another company in the same group - reseller arrangements are still not quite there. Early on their technical habits made life interesting - changing servers during the day without telling anyone, leaving lines with no service for hours - sort of thing an IT department might do - never a Telco. That's improved.
"I had customers moving out of one BT exchange area who wanted to keep their numbers - so it was SIP on ADSL or nothing. If we haven't tried something out we don't sell it. Working mainly from home and on the move gave me an extra reason to overcome the high rental and relative cost of call forwarding with ISDN. I am a mile down a country lane from a BT exchange and much of the time it works - no it's better than that - it's crystal - but not always and one or two calls drop out. "The two customers who tried it next were moving out of their BT exchange area. They had poor results and were extremely patient. Despite creating local area networks on site that flew, trying every router known to man and using up all my goodwill with suppliers, ADSL just wasn't up to the task. It didn't seem to be just distance dependent.
"The gravedigger of SIP is still ADSL, because a service without quality of service (QoS) and SIP prioritisation across the network is not quite ISDN. There is no return on investment for small companies with leased lines or SDSL.
"This was only the gates to the graveyard of SIP. After this supplier went under, my numbers were in limbo. This is to do with Porting Agreements. Say I'd like to move to Gamma to use their inbound service - Yup - Gamma have a porting agreement with BT - but hardly anyone else. I've now found that to move numbers anywhere else I'd have to go back to BT for a contract first - and they have no SIP offering so I would lose mobile (and come to that affordable) service and have to move twice."
Another View
Patrick Copping, Business Development Director of Cardiff-based Swyx reseller Atia has around 35 customers on SIP trunks - mostly provided by supplier VoIP Unlimited.
"We initially tried a number of different suppliers for SIP trunks but we had a few issues setting the services up. With VoIP Unlimited we found their stability and service to be good so we have stuck with them. I can't say it has always been without problems but overall it has been a good experience.
"We buy broadband through Brightstar, a small, very niche but technically focussed company who are very good at what they do. The interconnect between them and our SIP provider works very well: they talked to each other to make sure it was right largely on the back of the fact that we were doing a large amount of deals.
"We use SIP as an ISDN 30 replacement for our customers. We use it ourselves in-house as well where we have 20 users connected across three offices. Largely, SIP trunking works; we have had a few connectivity issues in certain parts of the country but 99% of the time it works well. Number porting has been generally OK, not fantastic but OK.
"Disaster recovery is also pushed as an application as well especially with Swyx customers with more than 50 users. Generally we recommend a failover second server or as an absolute minimum the ability to divert numbers elsewhere. Normally we would have two broadband providers for disaster recovery. We have just deployed a 55-site Swyx-based network for a customer that uses SIP trunks throughout. There's no going back to ISDN for Atia."