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SIP Trunking and the Death of the Voice Silo
The Voice Report (Vol. 31, No. 16)
Hank Levine and Jack Deal
Pundits have been forecasting the final and complete merger of voice and data communication for decades. But as long as there was a TDM world with PBXs or Centrex to manage and local minutes to buy, the ILECs had a franchise, with voice and data managed separately in many enterprises. Now, the rapid deployment of SIP trunking shows every sign of upending what is left of the ILEC wireline business. And that will finally close the merger of voice and data management.
To begin at the beginning, SIP trunking isn’t really trunking, and there is no such thing as a SIP trunk in the physical sense. SIP – Session Initiation Protocol – is an IETF-defined protocol for establishing, modifying and terminating telephone calls (called sessions) over an IP-based network. It’s rapidly becoming the dominant standard for VoIP.
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