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What's a SIP Trunk?
Can anyone tell me in simple terms what a SIP Trunk is and who would use it?
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5 Answers
SIP is a standard that is widely accepted within the Telecommunication Industry. It stands for Session Initialization Protocol. Most telecommunications systems today are either based on SIP, or suppport SIP in some fashion or another. SIP trunks are a method of connecting SIP systems together, however, traditionally a trunk is used to describe the connection between the telephone system and the service provider (Telephone Company, Internet Telephony Service Provider, etc.).
With a sip telephone system, you would have telephones, which are referred to as User Agents in the SIP world, and in many cases you have trunks that connect the telephone system to a telecommunications provider that connects your calls to either the Public Switch Telephone Network (traditional telephone company service) or to other IP based systems.
Many companies find SIP trunks to have lower cost than traditional Analog or digital trunks from traditional telecom service providers. Companies can find great savings with SIP trunks.
In my view, there are two types of trunks available - facilities and no facilities based. Facilities based trunks have an IP connection directly from the customer premesis to the telephone switch, where a non-facilities based connection used the Internet in a best effort to connect the two points. The non-facilities based is popular, because of lower costs, but it comes at a potential risk of lower call quality from a facilities based trunk.
Its also important to ensure that the SIP trunk provider is compatible with the SIP device it will connect to. Although SIP is a standard, there are variations in how the standard can be applied, and not all equipment is compatible with each other.
In essence, SIP trunking connects a company’s voice calls to an Internet connection rather than the traditional telephone network (Public Switched Telephone Network). There are different ways that companies can make such connections, which has resulted in the original meaning becoming a bit blurry. Below are a couple of links to explanations about how these systems may work.
http://searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid186_gci13...
http://blog.tmcnet.com/third-screen/2008/07/definition-of-sip-trunk-1.html
Specifically, SIP is a signalling protocol. It does not compress calls. SIP does not fill your T-1 allowing you to get more utilization. SIP does not do quality of service.
However, as a Signalling protocol, it does negotiate the end to end signalling, which allows the end devices to negotiate what compression standard they can and will use, it does facilitate the end to end connectivity to allow calls to be routed over a T1 as an IP stream that runs with QOS measures on your network along with other protocols.
This is an important understanding, as once SIP negotiates the end to end signalling for the call, it is out of the call, leaving it to RTP for the conversation, until another change is required, such as Music on Hold, Transfer, Conference, etc.
Don,
Session Initiated Protocol is one of the latest standards in telephony. One of the most common ways that SIP is used today is in the compression of voice calls to enable more calls on a circuit. At the same time, Quality of Service can be enabled to allow voice calls to reach their destination before data does. This provides clear, latency free calls and a full utilization of a circuit.
A traditional integrated PRI/T-1 will typically have a certain amount of channels dedicated to voice calls. The problem is that when nobody is on the phone, those channels are sitting idle with no chance of grabbing that bandwidth for data usage. SIP uses the whole circuit allowing you to push more data if nobody is on the phone.
Here are two websites to check out.
http://www.sipforum.org/content/view/19/72/
Wikepedia actually has a pretty good definition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Derek Roush
VocalPoint Consulting Group
www.vocalpointcg.com
Don,
Hopefully a nice and easy answer for you.
Consider the difference between SIP and existing PRI, as being similar to PRI and old analogue lines. Ignore the technology behind the product name. These are telephone lines delivered in a slightly different way.
Yes there are and will be additional features and possible benefits, but at the moment these are telephone lines that anyone can have/ use, as long as they find a decent supplier with a robust network and experince of deploying this technology.
Richard
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