Enterprises such as contact centers, universities and government organizations have a growing interest in using SIP and H.323 trunks for interconnecting IP-PBX islands and enabling native IP communications for voice, conferencing, messaging and collaboration. As they migrate to an all-IP environment they are looking to service providers to take VoIP traffic from their sites and provide IP to PSTN gateway services for inbound and outbound traffic.
Several benefits can be realized by leveraging IP trunks:
Reducing costs by eliminating media gateways and TDM voice trunks while collapsing applications on existing data network.
Simplifying operations by transferring media gateway and PSTN interconnection management to a provider.
Accelerating provisioning and deployment.
Creating flexible routing policies that provide cost-effective call termination, disaster recovery and continuity.
Eliminating unnecessary IP to TDM to IP conversions.
Enabling new services and applications that require end-to-end IP connectivity such as interactive video, presence, instant messaging, multimedia collaboration and unified communications.
Connecting IP-PBXs to provider networks using IP trunks requires a trusted and successful border between enterprise and provider. This includes:
Hiding and protecting resources and user information from attack and misuse.
Exchanging traffic across networks with differing or conflicting characteristics.
Maintaining network availability and service quality during abnormal busy periods.
Routing calls in cost-effective manner and capturing session data for accounting and traffic management and planning.
Complying with government regulations.
To overcome these challenges enterprises and providers are deploying session border controllers (SBCs) at both ends of the IP trunk. These enable seamless communications across network borders and are used to mediate the differences in the various networks and provide security, quality and cost control.
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