Can Avaya's Dynamic SIP Give You A Better Voice Network?

Can Avaya's Dynamic SIP Give You A Better Voice Network?

​Avaya's Cloud Service division offers SIP service in a burstable, pay-only-for-what-you-use model. Is this a visionary low-overhead and high-availability way to provision SIP trunking in your communications network?

SIP (Session Initiated Protocol) trunking is the modern telephone line, a data service that provides you with the connections to the public communications network your business needs to make or take phone calls. Chances are you’re paying for SIP service in your business in one of two ways.

​The first way is per channel. You contract with a carrier for SIP channels connected to your on-premise or cloud-based phone system. You purchase enough SIP channels to have an active phone connection for as many simultaneous calls your business needs to make. You then pay by the minute for the time you connect to domestic or international long-distance numbers (inbound or outbound). Your rate on both channels and minutes is based on your negotiating power. Alternatively, your carrier may offer a bundled SIP service; channels and (usually domestic) long-distance minutes together in packages at a flat, per-channel fee.

For efficiency, carriers route all their customer’s SIP calls out to the public network on a set of carefully-managed master trunks, a pool of resources shared across their entire customer base. For stand-alone trunk customers, carriers profit by selling you capacity at the highest rate they can get from you. Unless you’re the single-largest customer they have, you are not getting their absolute best rate. For bundle customers, carriers use the law of averages to charge you a price that covers how many minutes of toll calling the average business user makes, and profits every month you don’t use all of the minutes and SIP trunks they have allocated to your account.

“Why do we pay for SIP channels that sit idle 90% of the time?”

But if the technology exists to pool resources like SIP trunks and access to the public network for calls, why do individual business customer have to pay for channels or minutes they may never use? Why do we pay for SIP channels that sit idle 90% of the time, just in case you need them in your busiest moments? Can’t an individual customer get access to a pooled SIP service on a pay-as-you-use-it basis, access SIP channels on the fly, or turn up and turn down channels only when you need them without carrier minimums and penalties?

​On a call with Avaya about their Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) product, we learned that to empower developers to turn up and turn down applications using their platform quickly, Avaya purchased and integrated a SIP carrier. Which means Avaya, and developers on their platform, have immediate access to provision local, mobile, and toll-free telephone numbers, as well as have SIP trunking and long-distance phone services ready to make and receive calls to and from the public network.

The most intriguing aspect of this carrier SIP service was that Avaya sells it on a metered, per-minute basis. Meaning, you don't have to contract for fixed, standby SIP trunks to connect your communications application to the outside world. You pay for SIP channel and minutes only as you need and use it.

Interested in learning more about how you can leverage Avaya’s Dynamic SIP to improve the efficiency of your voice network? Contact us for a free consultation.