In the same way that social media and smartphones have been driven by consumers, SIP Trunking may end up driven by small to medium businesses. That’s the implication of a Heavy Reading report, which Sean Buckley of Fierce Telecom wrote about earlier this year.

The report says – and we’ve talked about this before – that enterprises are becoming more comfortable with SIP Trunking, to the point that the number of SIP trunks should nearly triple by 2013. Heavy Reading pegs the number of trunks at 8.5 million last year, and projected growth to 24.3 million in 2013.

The report, according to Heavy Reading’s news announcement, takes a look at the growing acceptance of SIP Trunking by small and medium-sized businesses. As analyst Denise Culver, author of the report, explained, "SIP trunking is a way for enterprises that once were considered too small to afford leased-line services to gain competitive edge against larger competitors, but at a much lower price point."

It’s not necessarily a path strewn with rose petals, though. Enterprises of all sizes still have questions about quality of service in a SIP Trunking environment, though they really don’t need to. At least that’s our view at Sprint. The Heavy Reading report would seem to side with us on that, with Culver declaring that “…it's clear that more small businesses are becoming convinced that IP-based networks will meet their needs, which will lead to significant growth in SIP trunking deployments.”

Worth noting are some key findings of the report, such as:

-SIP trunks provide 50 to 70 percent cost savings per trunk over TDM circuits.

-SIP Trunking should, within two years, become the main foundation and conduit for delivery of cloud-based enhanced services because of its flexibility and extensibility.

-SIP Trunking can help enterprises expand outside their region and drive migration toward hosted IP Telphony services.

So it looks like the migration to SIP Trunking may be a grassroots movement. That works.

Other SIP Trunking studies you might find of interest include:
World Business VoIP Services Market Set to Double in Size by 2015, Says ABI Research
SIP trunking gaining on T1 lines as companies seek efficiency, Infonetics Research
SIP Trunking - 5 Ways to Make Your Business More Competitive, Focus Research