The panelists on the session "Selling SIP Trunking" at Channel Partners seems to have missed the mark in helping the audience get to square one for selling it. Without going into all the issues they should have addressed here are three tips.
1. Make sure you know what SIP means (Session Initiation Protocol). Basically it provides signaling in order for SIP devices to call one another over a broadband Internet connection. If you want to know more about the protocol go to the SIP Forum, a nonprofit industry interoperability organization at sipforum.org.
2. SIP devices can be hardphones, wireless phones, softphones and other devices such as soda machines and they communicate directly with one another. This is just like the way your PC communicates with a website. The features are in the device, not PBX. Practically speaking this means I can use my laptop with softphone as a telephone and can take it anywhere, plug into an Internet connection and begin making or receiving calls from other SIP devices without a PBX. If I need to call outside my SIP network or receive a call, my gateway provider gives me a PSTN number. Features such as voicemail, transfer and conference can be added through software and from the provider.
3. Bandwidth planning is paramount. SIP devices use a codec, a fancy word for computer chip, to process calls into international standard formats. G.711 is high-bandwidth, high-performance voice calls of 64 kbps. Low-performance (much like cellular) and low-bandwidth voice calls of 8 kbps are G.729. The most important point in planning for SIP implementations is to allocate 80-100 kbps per call for G.711 and around 30 for G.729. While G.711 provides for 64 kbps of voice it needs more bandwidth because of the packetizing (overhead) for an IP network. For G.711 take the total number of simultaneous (concurrent) calls times 100 kbps and that is the bandwidth needed for peak times. The customer benefits when users are not on the telephone; the bandwidth is automatically available for data needs. Most SIP Trunking providers have their own limitations on the number of calls and available bandwidth.
Contact the author at cross@gocross.com.
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