Sprint Nextel has announced general availability of its SIP Trunking service for businesses. The service has been available since early this year specifically to support businesses with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2. Sprint (News - Alert) claims it was one of the first U.S.-based providers of SIP trunking services qualified for use with Office Communications Server 2007 R2.
Sprint SIP Trunking leverages the Sprint Global MPLS network by using a single IP connection to facilitate the convergence of voice, data and video communication. This convergence reduces local, long-distance and calling feature expenses.
“The advantages of SIP Trunking are in its flexibility and scalability, leveraging the power of Sprint’s Global MPLS network,” said Paget Alves (News - Alert), president of business markets group, Sprint, in a
release. “SIP Trunking is critical to delivering more value to our business customers because it eliminates the costly local trunks a business would need to purchase from local telephone companies and allows them to share capacity over one IP connection for multiple locations and applications.”
“The integration of Sprint SIP Trunking with Office Communications Server 2007 R2 allows businesses to further consolidate communications workloads into the IP network,” added Moz Hussain, director of the unified communications group at Microsoft (News - Alert) Corp. “Services including voice conferencing and telephony can be delivered efficiently to help customers save costs and see increased value with unified communications.”
SIP Trunking allows IP PBXs to deliver the features and functionality of combined local LEC and LD-provider services along with Class of Service support of other real-time data. It also can provide connections to industry-leading unified communications applications based on SIP, a signaling protocol for setup and teardown of voice communications sessions over IP networks.
SIP Trunking allows companies to make “any distance” calls between enterprise locations with the service at no additional charge. In addition it reduces the amount of trunking equipment on the customer premise, thus reducing power consumption and overall carbon footprint. What’s more, customers only have to deal with a single service provider for their communication needs, thus simplifying vendor management.
Sprint SIP Trunking is available through Sprint’s newly formed Business Markets Group (BMG).
With more than 4,000 sales, support, marketing and operations personnel, BMG is solely dedicated to enterprise, general business and public sector customers. It delivers wireless, wireline and converged solutions for companies, drawing on Sprint’s 3G mobile broadband network (with 4G WiMAX (News - Alert) coming soon), its national push-to-talk network, and its comprehensive portfolio of devices and applications.