SIP trunking is pretty busy these days, here are some news stories you may have missed this week:

TMC’s (News - Alert) Anil Sharma wrote that Appia Communications, a provider of managed communications and network services, unleashed the power of SIP by removing concurrent call limitations on its SIP trunking products.

“Call path restrictions do not adapt to customers' changing requirements,” said Victor von Schlegell, president of Appia.

Schlegell said that customers need their phone services to support marketing campaigns, seasonal changes in workforce levels, cyclical call volumes, and so forth. SIP trunks should enable – not limit – customers as these demands arise.

“We continue to simplify our products to address our customers' needs,” said Jason Ulm, vice president of channel sales at Appia. Ulm said that customers get to decide how many concurrent calls to make – as they need them – for a consistent and predictable price.

And TMC’s Beecher Tuttle noted that Unified Communication products have become critical to the success of organizations large and small due to their ability to integrate next-generation voice, video, data and mobile communications with reduced complexity and cost.

Connecting UC systems to the outside world is most commonly done via Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (SIP) trunks, which are exceedingly popular because they provide more flexibility, greater capacity for advanced features and lower operating costs than legacy alternatives.

However, SIP-based communication from outside the enterprise is forced to traverse firewalls and/or routers that perform Network Address Translation (NAT) because traffic doesn't automatically make its way to the local area network (LAN).This occurs due to the very nature of firewalls, which are aimed at preventing outside sources from communicating with the LAN.

Traversing firewalls and NATs obviously can create security concerns, so how do enterprises take advantage of all the benefits of UC and SIP while maintaining control? This very topic is discussed in detail in a recent white paper from ShoreTel (News - Alert), a provider of next-gen UC tools.

TMC also had a guest article by Steven Johnson (News - Alert), president of Ingate, saying lately we’ve seen (in Ingate’s business) a surge of small businesses installing SIP trunks. SIP trunks were first adopted by SMBs that saw the cost-saving potential with shifting voice traffic to SIP. Larger enterprises have also caught on as they realized that the productivity benefits with unified communications were exceptional. UC also offers them a competitive edge.

Today SMB installations are taking center stage again, and especially smaller businesses – even those with two to five people – are tapping into this opportunity. Unlike larger companies that can negotiate with carriers for fantastic rates on traditional telephony (even down to fractions of a penny for every minute), these small shops don’t have the same kind of leverage, and they find themselves having to pay much higher rates than their larger competitors. This makes SIP trunking, which reduces telephony costs significantly and often pays for itself in six months, an unbeatable deal.

While each dollar spent by small businesses has a much bigger impact than it does for their competitors, each dollar saved also has a greater impact. SIP trunks lower costs very quickly. The fact that ROI is achieved quickly as well is also very compelling for growing businesses.