Digium Offers SIP Trunking Cloud Service

By David Delony
Contributing Writer

Digium, makers of the popular Asterisk and Switchvox (News - Alert) VoIP software platforms, has announced Digium SIP Trunking on its Digium Cloud Services (DCS) platform.

True to Asterisk’s open-source roots, the new cloud offering is based on open standards.

"Digium (News - Alert)'s award-winning Switchvox Cloud offering is deployed on a high-availability, fault-tolerant network. Now, that same network is available for anyone who needs SIP trunking capability,"  Amick, director of product management at Digium, said. "Digium has ensured maximum reliability by building a carrier-class network and is excited to offer our Switchvox customers and the Asterisk (News - Alert) community the only SIP trunking network built and certified by the Asterisk company. Additionally, Digium SIP Trunking isn't limited to just Asterisk users, it's based on open standards and will work with any RFC standard, SIP-enabled PBX (News - Alert)."

Digium is offering two plans to customers: a Channelized plan with a flat rate and a metered plan for customers whose call volume varies based on the season. For example, a company that does a lot of business around the holiday season but is relatively quiet the rest of the year might want to spend less money with the metered plan, even if it has higher costs around the season it does the most sales.

Digium also has a quote tool that allows potential customers to see how much they’d expect to pay if they signed up. When customers do sign up, they can get their credentials and be connected in minutes. Calls between other Digium Cloud customers are free of charge.

The SIP trunking system also allows for a number of DIDs (Direct Inward Dial) schemes, such as for 911 call centers and toll-free numbers. It also supports T.38 fax pass-through and multiple codecs.

Digium might be the company that started the VoIP revolution and one of the open source movement’s greatest success story apart from Linux. Digium has shown that the ideals of open source software of giving away the source code for its software can coexist with business.

The company has traditionally made money by selling hardware necessary to connect to the PSTN, but is also moving into services with its cloud offerings. This seems like a natural extension of Digium’s offerings, building on its own software to offer extra services. While competitors could use Asterisk software, they can’t duplicate the actual service. A lot of cloud services are already built on open source technologies like Linux and MySQL.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi