What is SIP trunking?
Well, to answer that question I want you to take a trip with me
down history lane, before the era of cell phones.
Are you there?
Kind of hard, right?
You remember back when we had home phones, just phones
sitting around the house?
They could be corded or they could be cordless.
And only one person can use them at the time.
You'd pick up a phone in the back room
and someone would be talking, you'd be like, oh, sorry,
didn't know you were on the phone.
And that was because our entire home phone system was powered
by a single analog line.
In a nutshell, that meant one line, one call.
If someone was using the phone, no one else could use it.
And depending on how many people you had in the house,
you'd either learn to live with that
or you'd get more analog lines, one run to each room.
Well, transition your mind over to the business environment.
This is now starting to get a little unique because we're not
only interested in calling the outside world,
making and receiving phone calls from our business,
but we also call each other.
And it wouldn't make sense to buy a phone line per person.
The expense would be astronomical.
Instead, we would put in a PBX system.
What it stands for is really significant--
Private Branch Exchange.
Simply put, you can run your own phone company
inside of your business.
You can make calls between individual phones
without actually having to pay for phone lines.
And this is where you got the idea
of dialing 9 for an outside line in a lot of organizations.
You'd get a second dial tone and now you're
calling the outside world.
By the way, that building represents the phone company.
Now in smaller businesses, they would bring analog lines
into that PBX.
Again, one line, one call.
People could call between each other's phones.
One person might dial 9 and use up that analog line.
And no one else could dial 9 while they were on the phone.
They'd get a busy signal.
So as the business scaled, they would start
bringing in more analog lines.
One by one they would go, adding lines
so more people could make calls or receive cars
from the outside world.
Now at some point, adding individual analog lines
would just become unruly, not only
from a number of wires perspective but also
from a cost.
Analog lines are usually loaded down
with government taxes and fees.
So each line would add significantly to the expense.
So for that, we moved the direction of digital lines.
Sometimes people would commonly called these PRI or sometimes
BRI connection.
That stands for ISDN Basic Rate or Primary Rate connections.
With digital technology, instead of using electrical signal
to send communication, we would digitize it
in to individual numbers.
And that allowed us to have one line for many calls,
specifically two calls per connection with a BRI port
and 23 calls per connection with PRI port.
Well, there are still a lot of PBX systems
out there to this day.
It is now considered a fading or legacy technology
because voice over IP has taken over the world of telephony.
Voice over IP means that you can have now one set of cabling,
not one for the phones and one for the computers,
one set of infrastructure meaning routers
and switches and everything else that powers that cabling,
one connection to the internet or the wide area
network instead of having separate connections for phone
lines, and one group of people supporting all this technology.
Instead of having the PBX world or the telephony world
and the data world you can now have one person
that rules it all--
the modern day IT guy.
He's smiling.
And to line up with all this technology
comes the realm of SIP trunking.
SIP literally stands for the Session Initiation Protocol.
You guys have all heard of TCP/IP, right?
That's the protocol that runs the data network.
That's what allows your Dell laptop
to work with the Apple laptop to communicate
to the internet, all using the same protocol for internet
and data connectivity.
You can think of SIP as the same thing,
except for the voice world.
It allows Cisco phones to work Avaya phones to work
with computer based telephony.
It's the industry standard protocol
that allows all of them to speak on the same level.
Now SIP trunking is the new world of outside communication.
There's a lot we could expand on with SIP trunking.
For instance, let's just say this whole picture right here
represents one company, Nabisco, cranking out
Fig Newtons to the world.
And Nabisco does a hostile takeover of the Keebler elves.
And you want to bring the two worlds into one common network.
Well, the Keebler elves might have their own wide area
network.
And that's connected all their own phone system.
But you can define a SIP trunk between these two that says
when somebody on this IP phone dials 8--
we'll just say as an outside digit,
and you can make up your own outside digits whatever you
want them to be--
the phone system can send that call over
to the world of the Keebler elves.
And now you're in their phone system.
That's one use of SIP trunking.
But most the time when people are talking about SIP trunking,
they're talking about outside access.
There's now a whole new realm of providers called ITSPs--
Internet Telepathy Service Providers.
So instead of going to the "phone company"-- and I
put that in quotes if you can't see
my hands waving in the air--
to get your outside phone service, you can go to an ITSP.
So check it out.
I'm just going to go to Google and type in SIP trunking.
Look at all these advertisements right up front.
I'll just go to ringcentral/sip and this is $19.99 a month
for each SIP trunk.
Drop back.
Here's another one, getvoiceoverip.com.
There's a whole bunch of SIP trunking providers--
Flowroute, Vonage, Nextiva, MegaPath.
Just go down the list and you can see all their ratings
and how much the setup costs are, and so on and so forth.
These are people available on the internet that
will take the calls from your system
and send them out to the rest of the global telepathy network.
It can also receive calls.
You get something known as a DID, a Direct Inward Dial
number.
Normal people call that a phone number, that
when calls are received they can come into your system
and you can distribute it wherever you go.
How SIP trunking providers bill is all over the map.
Some of them bill based on the number of concurrent calls
that you have, kind of using that phone line
concept like six people want to call at a time,
OK, you need six concurrent connections.
Blah.
There's your monthly rate.
Some of them bill per minute.
For instance, one of those providers that I saw in there
was called Flowroute.
I've used them quite a bit.
They give you unlimited connections.
You can have as many calls as you
want but you pay per minute.
So in the simplest definition I can say,
SIP trunking is a technology that connects phone systems
together.
That could be internal private systems like Nabisco
and Keebler elves or it could be your system connecting
to the outside world.
I hope this has been informative for you.
And I'd like to thank you for viewing.