We love a good debate. Since you can’t get them when it comes to political candidates anymore (everybody’s too worried about each answer containing a good sound bite and one of two or three talking points), a good place to turn might be NoJitter.
There’s an interesting back-and-forth exchange between consultant Marty Parker and NoJitter Editor Eric Krapf about SIP Trunking. It will be clear which of the two of them we side with, but both have good points to make. Marty’s side is here, and Eric’s is here.
Marty contends that SIP Trunking isn’t as important as it is often made out to be, pointing to the fact that voice traffic on carrier trunks is declining (in part because of the advances of various forms of Unified Communications) and that SIP Trunks are not inherently a UC platform. His argument is that UC systems send traffic over the LAN, WAN, and Internet, and while they may use SIP protocols, they only use the trunks themselves for residual public network traffic.
Eric counters that by arguing that the public switched network is certainly not going away anytime soon, and enterprises need optimal connections to it, particularly for contact centers. He says that even if this wireline voice traffic is declining, it is and will remain a significant consideration in any company’s business.
As a company that offers SIP Trunking, we think that the value of SIP Trunks should not be minimized. They are not an end in themselves, but a strategic step (and a very cost-effective one) toward implementation of UC in the enterprise. So even though we side with Eric on that point, we do recognize Marty’s further points regarding UC.
Marty says enterprises should first draft a UC and collaboration roadmap, which will help illustrate the eventual requirements for voice connections to the public network, before committing to SIP Trunks. Planning first, then doing? You can’t argue with that logic, even though he says such planning might lead to a smaller SIP Trunking commitment.
He adds that planning prevents an enterprise from simply migrating the old way of doing business onto new technology platforms, adding, “If you want the biggest savings, change how you do business, rather than only changing the tools for doing business the same old way.”
Eric also goes on to make some good points, among them the fact that until there is some other common platform that can guarantee ubiquitous connectivity, the public switched network will be with us. Connecting to it will mean SIP Trunks, although eventually, he adds, “there should be no discrete ‘SIP trunks’; you should just have your IP trunks, connected to an Internet that's fully enabled for multimedia traffic handling and ubiquitous addressing. Right now, we're not there, we're in a transition stage.”
Isn’t it exciting to be a part of the evolution of communication (voice) and to dream of the possibilities that technology will give our future generations? Does anyone else have ‘goose bumps’?
