Ensuring Business Continuity with Redundant SIP Trunks: Why Choosing a Single Provider Makes Sense
In today’s fast-paced business environment, communication infrastructure is the backbone of any successful enterprise. Downtime, especially in voice services, can have significant impacts—from frustrated customers to lost revenue and damaged reputation. For businesses that rely on constant, reliable communication, ensuring redundancy and business continuity is critical. And as a SIPTRUNK reseller, you can provide that peace of mind for your customers.
One popular solution for businesses is Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunks, which enable the transmission of voice over internet protocol (VoIP). However, a single SIP trunk can still leave businesses vulnerable to outages, so many dealers opt for redundancy with both primary and secondary SIP trunks.
While redundancy is a necessity, the way some businesses go about it can create unnecessary complexity and costs. In this blog, we’ll explore the challenges of traditional SIP trunk redundancy setups and explain why selling your customers a solution like SIPTRUNK’s superTRUNK is a smarter, simpler, and more cost-effective alternative for business continuity.
The Need for Redundancy in Voice Communications
No business is immune to potential network failures. Whether it’s a physical disruption (like power outages or natural disasters) or software/hardware issues, losing phone service can be devastating for companies that rely on it to communicate with clients and customers.
Redundancy is crucial to maintaining business continuity when these disruptions occur. In terms of voice services, redundancy usually means having multiple SIP trunks located in different geographical locations—at least a primary and a secondary line. If the primary trunk goes down, the secondary kicks in, ensuring the company stays connected.
Traditional Approach: Separate Vendors for Primary and Secondary SIP Trunks
Many businesses take a traditional approach by purchasing a primary SIP trunk from one provider and a secondary SIP trunk from a different provider. The thinking behind this is clear—if one vendor’s network goes down, the other should still be operational. While this might seem like a solid strategy, it brings several challenges:
- Management Complexities: Maintaining two separate SIP trunk providers means managing two separate accounts, contracts, pricing structures, and service level agreements (SLAs). This can quickly become a logistical nightmare for dealers and IT teams who already have a lot on their plates. Keeping track of which provider handles which network, billing cycles, and support lines adds unnecessary hassle.
- Increased Costs: Purchasing SIP trunks from two vendors can significantly increase costs. Not only are you paying for the trunks themselves, but you’re also dealing with the administrative overhead of managing two service providers. Additionally, coordinating with two vendors to align configurations and ensure proper failover can require external consulting or advanced technical expertise, which adds to the expense.
- Failover Challenges: When using SIP trunks from two different vendors, setting up seamless failover—where calls automatically reroute to the secondary line without interruption—can be difficult. Each provider may have different systems and protocols, leading to compatibility issues and misconfigurations. This can result in failed or delayed call rerouting, rendering the redundancy strategy ineffective.
A Simpler, More Effective Solution: SIPTRUNK’s superTRUNK
SIPTRUNK’s superTRUNK offers a streamlined approach to redundancy that solves many of the problems associated with traditional setups. With superTRUNK, dealers can provide their customers with both primary and secondary SIP trunks through a single provider—SIPTRUNK—while still maintaining the critical requirement of using two separate networks. This ensures true redundancy without the management hassle.
Here’s how superTRUNK addresses the key challenges:
- Single Vendor Simplicity: With SIPTRUNK’s superTRUNK, you no longer need to juggle multiple vendors, accounts, or contracts. All your SIP trunks are sourced through one provider, SIPTRUNK, which leverages the technology of its parent company, BCM One, to provide separate networks for the primary and secondary trunks. This significantly simplifies billing, support, and management, allowing you to focus on other important tasks.
- Cost Efficiency: Dealers can drastically reduce costs by bundling the primary and secondary SIP trunks from one vendor. The administrative and operational overhead associated with managing two separate providers disappears, and SIPTRUNK offers competitive, fixed pricing that ensures you get the best value for your investment.
- Seamless Failover: With superTRUNK, failover becomes seamless. Since both SIP trunks are managed by the same provider, us, you can easily configure call routing for your customers to automatically reroute calls from the primary to the secondary trunk in the event of a failure. This guarantees that downtime is minimized, and your customers experience no interruptions.
How Does superTRUNK Work?
The superTRUNK solution leverages SIPTRUNK’s parent relationship with BCM One to offer a more resilient SIP trunking solution. Here’s a breakdown of how it works:
- Primary and Secondary SIP Trunks: Both primary and secondary trunks are sourced from SIPTRUNK but use two completely separate networks. This provides the level of redundancy businesses need for true business continuity. Even if one network fails, the second network is there to handle the calls.
- Simple Management: Since everything is handled by one provider, SIPTRUNK, configuration, monitoring, and maintenance become straightforward. SIPTRUNK provides a user-friendly platform for dealers to easily set up and manage their customers’ trunks, configure failover settings, and monitor trunk performance in real time.
By using superTRUNK, businesses get the best of both worlds: redundancy across separate networks with the simplicity and cost savings of a single-vendor solution.
Business Reasons for Backup SIP Trunks
Having a backup SIP trunk is crucial for several business reasons:
Redundancy and Reliability
Failover Protection: If the primary SIP trunk fails due to technical issues or outages, the backup SIP trunk can take over, ensuring continuous communication.
Geographical Redundancy: Different SIP trunks can be in different geographical areas, reducing the risk of a single point of failure.
Cost Efficiency
Pay-as-You-Go: Many SIP providers offer flexible pricing models, allowing businesses to only pay for the backup service when it is used, minimizing costs.
Scalability
On-Demand Capacity: Businesses can easily add or remove lines as needed, accommodating growth or changes in call volume without significant infrastructure changes.
Enhanced Call Quality
Multiple Carrier Relationships: SIP trunk providers often have relationships with multiple carriers, ensuring optimal call routing and quality.
Indirect Impact on Recent Situations
CrowdStrike and Microsoft Outage
Incident Overview: A faulty CrowdStrike update caused a massive IT outage, affecting millions of Microsoft Windows systems worldwide45.
Relevance: Indirectly, businesses with backup SIP trunks could have maintained communication despite the widespread IT disruptions. The redundancy would have allowed them to reroute calls through unaffected SIP trunks, minimizing downtime and maintaining critical operations.
Nashville AT&T Data Center Bombing
Incident Overview: The bombing of the AT&T data center in Nashville led to significant communication outages across multiple states.
Relevance: A backup SIP trunk located in a different region could have mitigated the impact of such a localized disaster. Businesses relying on a single SIP trunk in the affected area faced complete communication breakdowns, whereas those with geographically diverse SIP trunks could have rerouted calls to maintain service continuity.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How does superTRUNK ensure network redundancy?
superTRUNK provides two SIP trunks from different networks—if the primary network experiences an outage, calls can be configured to automatically route to the secondary trunk on the separate network. This ensures continuous communication and business continuity.
Will using a single provider limit my flexibility for call routing?
No. In fact, using superTRUNK gives you more flexibility in call routing, as both the primary and secondary SIP trunks can be managed from a single platform. You can easily configure and customize failover settings for your customers to ensure seamless call routing.
Is superTRUNK more expensive than using two separate vendors for SIP trunks?
No, superTRUNK is designed to be cost-effective. By sourcing both SIP trunks from one provider, you reduce administrative and operational costs, leading to significant savings. Plus, you’ll only need to deal with one contract and one billing structure.
A Powerful Solution to Give Your Customers Voice Resiliency
SIPTRUNK dealers have the opportunity to help their customers build voice resiliency while streamlining vendor management and reducing costs. Many organizations, particularly small to medium-sized businesses, have no resiliency, and others are over-complicating operations and overpaying for failover SIP trunks.
While SIP redundancy is essential for maintaining business continuity, managing SIP trunks from multiple vendors can lead to complexity and unnecessary expense. SIPTRUNK’s superTRUNK allows dealers to simplify this process for their customers by offering primary and secondary SIP trunks on two separate networks—from a single provider. This reduces their costs and streamlines operations while ensuring robust failover and reliable communication for your business.
Learn more about superTRUNK and how to talk about it with your customers and implement it for them so they can get peace of mind, simplify management, and save money. SIPTRUNK is hosting a dealer webinar to discuss all things superTRUNK, and we invite you to get registered and join us on October 15, 2024, at 1 PM EDT.