SIP Trunks

Authors include: Christina Hatting, Darryl Sladden and ATM Zakaria Swapan.

Migrating from traditional TDM to the internet for business-to-business telecommunication systems.

- Introduces Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking: a powerfully efficient and flexible new way to connect company phone systems with their telecom service providers.
- Helps managers plan to use SIP trunks more effectively, objectively assess costs and ROI, prepare Requests for Proposal, and choose amongst confusing vendor offerings.
- Presents proven best practices for implementation.

Roughly three-quarters of large companies in the U.S. have already switched to IP telephony, enabling rich-media applications such as collaborative meetings, video, presence-based communication choices, rich hard phone or soft phone displays and end user call control mechanisms. Service provider backbone networks have also largely converted to VoIP transport, realizing bandwidth and converged network architecture benefits. But there's one missing link in the equation: most businesses still connect to their service providers via oldfashioned, inflexible TDM trunks. Now, there's a better solution: SIP trunk interconnects. However, carriers have only recently brought SIP trunking offerings to market, and there's great confusion about both the technology and the offerings. In SIP Trunks, three leading Cisco experts bring clarity to every facet of the transition to SIP trunking. The authors separate the real benefits of SIP trunking from the myths; help decision-makers evaluate service provider SIP trunk offerings and structure RFPs; walk through cost analysis to identify realistic, achievable savings; review crucial network design considerations; present a detailed case study; and introduce proven best practices for every step of the implementation process.