With remote working the new norm, can you afford to be without voice services?

We’ve become so reliant on collaboration technologies like Zoom, Webex and Teams that many companies now consider them business critical. They’re an essential way of taking orders, signing contracts and engaging in all important face-to-face meetings. 

But as landlines (PSTN) and the integrated services digital network (ISDN) are phased out – by 2027 in our case – it’s going to be harder to continue running these technologies.

It was once sufficient to connect legacy voice systems to collaboration tools by adopting local voice gateways and taking on the added maintenance costs. But in light of the upcoming changes, this strategy is short sighted and costly. 

It will not only pay to make a full transition to an IP-based system sooner rather than later. (Our customers find the typical cost reduction of adopting global SIP is around 45% compared to using a legacy voice estate.) 

It’ll help maximise your migration if you embrace a session initiation protocol (SIP) solution that’s compatible with multiple in-market and emerging cloud collaboration platforms. 

This will ensure forward-thinking flexibility if you need to roll out new tools or technologies in the future.

You’ve more than likely experienced frustration over disrupted calls and degraded voice quality at some point. We know how stressful it can be when you’re trying to talk to suppliers or important customers over jittery or delayed connections. 

The situation only gets worse if you can’t get the support you need. Being stuck in a queue, or being passed from department to department, can be infuriating. 

That’s why it makes sense to do your due diligence with any SIP provider. 

Lower cost alternatives often don’t have a service element included, which means you might even struggle to get someone to help with your complaint. And when it comes to performance, voice quality differs hugely, particularly when delivering SIP over the internet. 

It's critical to choose a partner who can guarantee consistent levels of quality and is on hand to support you at all hours.

You might be tempted to use a different domestic SIP provider in each region to save costs. But taking a broader view by finding a single partner with strong global coverage will make your life a lot easier in the long term. 

Using a string of local solutions can create challenges:

• Exploring and negotiating the options in each region is a time-consuming process.
• If there’s a fault, tracking down the root cause of your problem can be a tedious process of elimination between all of your providers.
• There’s the added burden of the ongoing management of all of these suppliers and procurement costs.

Multiple providers will no doubt create concerns for your cyber security team too. Each SIP partner opens up your corporate network to another security policy, and most security departments disapprove of the added complications and vulnerabilities that that brings.

The benefit of using a global solution is that you’ll have a single overarching security policy and one point of contact across all countries.