SIP trunking is fairly well established as a way to connect business locations to a telephone service provider for network efficiency and cost savings. XO expands on this idea with a multi-site SIP trunking solution. Instead of having each location separately connect to a remote service provider, the branch offices, warehouses, and other locations can now use their existing WAN (Wide Area Network) to connect SIP phones back to a home office IP-PBX system. Internal calls stay on the corporate network. Outside calls are transfered on a SIP trunk to XO, where they are terminated to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).What does this mean for you as a business owner or network services manager? It’s an opportunity to reduce costs by reducing the number of PBX systems needed to support all your locations. There is also a cost advantage in eliminating local voice trunks to connect with customers and suppliers. If you are now maintaining separate voice and data networks at each location, you can merge them on to your existing WAN or use the XO MPLS IP-VPN solution as a cost effective voice and data WAN network.
A more subtle advantage to this arrangement is that each location will have access to the total trunk capacity of the organization rather than a local limitation. Locations can burst above their normal call capacity by sharing idle voice trunk capacity from other locations across the enterprise.
Once a multi-location or distributed enterprise SIP trunking strategy is in place, it becomes much easier to add additional locations. The basic infrastructure for handling enterprise wide telephony and connection to the outside world is already available. You simply need to add the telephone services for the new location incrementally.
This enterprise SIP solution is ideal for larger corporations or other organizations with many sites. But it could also work for any chain store, movie theater, gas station, quick serve restaurant or other franchise type business model where the home office manages voice and data for the individual stores. The efficiency of scale can offer considerable cost savings over “reinventing the wheel” at every location.
Do you have a multi-location business or distributed enterprise that might benefit from a cost savings through improving the efficiency of your voice and data networks? If so, it is certainly worth your while to take a closer look at enterprise VoIP solutions, including the new XO enterprise SIP offering.
