SIP trunking is a way to deliver voice and media over the Internet. If your business phone system, or PBX, can connect to the Internet and use the SIP protocol to make calls over the Internet, then SIP trunking can be a means of delivering high quality, reliable digital voice services for your business without the cost of additional hardware.

Businesses are embracing SIP trunking in ever-increasing numbers, with more organisations planning to adopt it over the next several years. It begs the question: Why is it so appealing?

Initially, it was all about budget and flexibility. As companies moved to IP environments and implemented Unified Communications (UC), the cost-effectiveness of SIP trunking was an obvious attraction to those looking to improve the bottom line. At the same time, departments from sales to customer service to IT saw the benefits of added flexibility and dependability. 

But SIP trunking offers other benefits as well – benefits that are becoming increasingly apparent to businesses whose success depends on keeping up with customers and market dynamics that demand increasing flexibility while minimising cost.

Below are five more reasons why SIP trunking is growing on popularity:

1. Ease of Expansion. Whether a business is growing or needs to accommodate offices in multiple locations, scaling the phone system can be a significant hurdle. SIP trunking not only simplifies the addition of new locations, but also optimises existing telephony. With SIP trunking, your existing phone system gains built-in redundancy with access to multiple carriers so if an outage does occur, your call quality and uptime won’t be impacted.  

2. Consolidation of Vendors. While SIP trunking reduces costs by both lowering call rates and reducing infrastructure needs, it also allows businesses to reduce the number of vendors they must deal with. Many SIP providers also provide other solutions such as PBX, UC and contact centre offerings, providing a single source for all your communications needs.

3. Ease of Management. Upgrading the phone system or adding additional lines used to be extremely costly and time consuming. You upgraded everything or spent hours installing new hard lines to increase capacity. With SIP trunking, however, telecommunications capabilities and new trunks can be added on demand, based on business needs at that moment. A new SIP trunking solution can be deployed within 30-60 days – or even a few weeks depending on the scope of the project.

But it’s not only the IT department that benefits from such ease of use. Because employees can make and receive calls seamlessly between internet-based telephony devices, they can easily communicate with other employees throughout the organisation and receive the same experience and level of service no matter their location.  

4. Improved Productivity. Such ease of use allows an organisation to realise significant productivity benefits. Its workforce can take full advantage of unified communications, improving collaboration and reducing time spent jumping through unnecessary telecommunications hoops. Plus, with the built-in redundancy and failover destinations, downtime due to disasters or other disruptions is eliminated.

5. High Satisfaction Levels. SIP trunking provides high levels of voice quality. In fact, 96% of the decision makers surveyed by SIP trunking review site Software Advice were satisfied with the quality of their calls, with 73% noting they were either “extremely” or “very” satisfied.