How Many Sip Trunks Does Your Organization Need?
Even in the age of texting, the average American makes or receives six phone calls per day.
In business situations, of course, people make a lot more than that. Between talking to coworkers and clients, people in an office might spend pretty much all day on the phone. This is great for business, but it can cost the company a lot in phone bill expenses.
Luckily, SIP trunks are a great technology that you can get for your business fairly cheaply. You might not know what these are yet, but they can save your business a lot of money.
Read on to learn what SIP trunking is and how to decide how many trunks you’ll need to best benefit your office.
What are SIP Trunks?
Before you can figure out how many SIP trunks your business needs, it’s important to know what exactly a SIP trunk is. Here, we’re going to tell you all you need to know about SIP trunking and how your business can benefit from it.
What Are They, Anyway?
SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol, trunking, is useful to pretty much any business with a phone system. Basically, it lets a business’s phones operate using an internet connection instead of a traditional phone line.
You may be wondering why this is special in the age of cell phones and digital calling. The fact of the matter is, though, that most offices and companies rely on landlines to place and receive corporate calls from desks.
SIP trunking lets your office maintain the landline, but connects them through the office WiFi rather than a phone line. Since you don’t have to pay more for a phone bill along with the internet bill, this can save you big on company expenses.
What Does It Do?
Suppose that there are two (or more) endpoints on an IP network. This is, after all, pretty much always the case. SIP trunking maintains communications features and lets them be operated between these two points.
It’s a common misconception that SIP is the provider of these communication services- it isn’t. The SIP network uses implementations called primitives that make different services possible.
These primitives encrypt information into SIP messages and transmit if between endpoints. Think of a restaurant- the server moves food between the kitchen and your table. In this case, the waiter is like the primitive, holding and moving the food that you want and moving it between the endpoints. SIP is like that.
SIP trunking also supports mapping protocols, giving its services more mobility. This means you’ll be able to access the network and communicate with other endpoints from anywhere in the office.
Begin Your Decision
Now that you know how SIP trunking works, you can start to think about how many SIP trunks you’ll need in your business. Since it operates between endpoints, you’re going to want to consider how many of these endpoints you have in the workplace.
You’re also going to want to consider the strength of your WiFi connection. If you have a weaker connection, having a lot of trunks and connections can really slow down your computers and phones by clogging up the lines.
What’s Your Business?
Like we touched on above, the number of SIP trunks you need depends on the number of points from which you want to make and receive calls. This depends on how your business works, as do pretty much all the deciding factors in deciding how many trunks you want.
How Big Is It?
The first thing you’ll want to consider before you begin looking for SIP trunks is how big your business is. Smaller businesses are obviously going to need less SIP trunking than larger ones because they have less endpoints that they’ll need to connect with each other.
If you have a company with over 100 employees, you can consider it a large one in terms of deciding how many SIP trunks you need. If you have a business like this, you’re going to want to use what’s referred to as the 3 to 1 rule.
This means that for every three call paths you have, you want to have one SIP trunk. Since these companies have heavy, medium, and light phone users in the office at the same time, you can get away with this phone to trunk line ratio.
Smaller companies of under 100 people don’t have a mix of user times like large ones do. If the office is smaller, this means everyone is probably going to be on the phone at the same time. Having too few SIP trunks will clog up the network, so you’re going to need to get more of them.
How Many Call Paths Do You Have?
From what we said above, you’re probably already getting the vibe that the amount of SIP trunks you have to get depends on the number of call paths you have open. If you think this is the case, congratulations! You’re absolutely correct.
The first question to consider is how many call paths you have in your office right now. Once you’ve done that, talk to your employees and see if they have any complaints about the speed of calls. If there’s a trend of them having a lot of busy signals or connection problems, you might want to get more lines.
Think about how many calls your employees make on a day to day basis. You’ll need more call paths the more calls they make. Once you decide how many call paths you want, you’ll either know how many SIP trunks you need based off the 3 to 1 rule or be able to figure it out for a smaller business.
Look Into SIP
SIP trunking is a great decision if you want to save both money and time around the office. It can be a challenge to decide how many SIP trunks you want to get if you don’t know how they work, but now that you do, you’ll be a pro at making the best decision for your company.
Now that you know how many SIP trunks you’ll need for your business, it’s time to get started! Click here to make an account that will let you get SIP trunks at an affordable price.
Time to get cracking!