British-managed VoIP and data communications provider 8el is formally launching its Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (SIP) trunking solution this week at an industry event in London.

 

The new solution, being unveiled at the IP 08 show October 1-2, enables customers to reduce the costs associated with telephony, while providing greater flexibility over numbering and scalability. The addition of SIP trunking brings some of the cost benefits available through VoIP to both IP- enabled and non-IP enabled private automatic branch exchanges (PABXs).

8el is now one of few communications providers to make the benefits of SIP trunking available as a commercial service to business users and has already successfully deployed the service to a number of U.K. customers.

SIP trunking enables customers to reduce or even eliminate dependency on the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) for business VoIP, by routing traffic across an IP circuit instead of via ISDN lines.

“SIP trunking is a relatively new direction and not many operators are offering it yet, largely because ensuring service quality depends on having the right support infrastructure in place — which we do,” said Justin Hamilton-Martin, managing director of 8el, in a statement. “We’ve engineered a SIP trunking solution that meets our customers’ high service quality expectations and it has already been ‘tried and tested’, with some of our existing customers already experiencing the benefits, not least of which is reduced costs associated with ISDN line rental.”

Other benefits of SIP trunking include scalability on a ‘per channel’ basis. As SIP trunking is not dependent on geography, the network will route calls to wherever the recipient is located, without any call-forwarding costs. Direct dialing in (DDI) numbers can also be allocated quickly and cost effectively and calls between SIP trunking users in the same network are free.

Installing SIP trunking simply involves adding an extra IP interface into the customer’s data network and this is part of the ‘all in one’ service that 8el provides. 8el provides 24/7 network monitoring through its managed SIP trunk service.

“With a managed service, users access our SIP based network via an on-site IP or ISDN based device, to create a SIP link to our core,” Hamilton-Martin said. “In addition, to ensure security is maintained for customers, we authenticate by IP address, route, user name and password via our session border controllers.”