MARKET REPORT SIP
SIP Trunk Market Experiences
Continued Growth
Telco incumbents across
Europe are all seeing
decreases in xed line
revenues, especially those
who are on a migration to an all-
IP network. Cavell Group notes
that major telco’s such as KPN,
Proximus and Orange have all
commented on this trend in
recent quarterly gures.
BT Group reported a
reduction in the overall group
revenue, down by 1% from 2017
as they delivered £17.55 billion of
revenue for the nine months to
31 December 2018.
e decline in enterprise
business was a contributing
factor as BT mentioned that this
was driven by the ‘continued
declines in traditional voice and
other legacy products, lower
equipment sales, and sale of
cables business’.
Developments in technology
rarely happen in series but
occur in overlapping parallels
so we should consider, but not
comment upon here other than
to say that as well as the shift
to all IP networks we are seeing
a similar trend away from any
kind of xed line service for both
voice and data towards mobile
based communications. is is
a move that is most likely to be
accelerated, particularly in the
case of data communications,
by the progressive worldwide
introduction of 5G networks.
SIP trunks are a mature,
productised market o ering;
service quality is miles away
SIP trunks should be ‘fl ying off the shelves’ with the shutdown of ISDN support a
mere handful of years away. With the forecast increase predicted in hosted/cloud
telephony by Research and Markets between now and 2023 we should also be
witnessing an equally nascent market in IP and SIP based phones
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26 | Comms Business Magazine | May 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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from products introduced say,
ten years ago, so how does the
channel view the market today?
Is this a price, feature or
quality led market?
“Any voice service is a mission
critical application,” says Paul
Wake eld, SIP Trunking
Product Manager at Gamma.
“ erefore, rst and
foremost, SIP trunks must
deliver, no matter what features
they come with and whatever the
cost may be, crystal clear voice.
Conversations with customers
on quality may include features
but the service has to have great
voice quality – it’s what users
expect.
Now, having said that, it is
a price driven market and in
that respect Gamma has been
disruptive in the market. As a
technology, SIP is better and
cheaper than ISDN in terms
of exibility in use, scalability
and features – such as disaster
recovery. SIP o ers tangible cost
reductions over ISDN – users
can save 50% to 60% on the
cost of existing ISDN.
Gamma is at the premium
end of the price market and that
has worked for us but quality
and value does fall in to a user
feature conversation.”
Wake eld says the market is
shifting with users not spending
more than they did ten years
ago but expecting more for the
same money and as the market
moves forward customers are
looking to increase technology
and functionality, for example,
Uni ed Communications.
“Services that were niche are
now commoditised; Gamma
has been o ering calls to mobile
numbers free of charge and,
for the last seven years, free
geographical number calls based
on a long-term contract.”
“ ere is a di erence
between SIP Trunks and SIP
handsets,” says Paul Taylor,
Sales Director at Voice ex.
“SIP Trunks are connected
to either an on-premise
telephony application or a
hosted single instance or
multi-tenanted application.
On-premise will normally use
a proprietary handset, hosted
will use either a proprietary
or SIP based handset. At
Voice ex the SIP Trunk
market continues to grow;
we are seeing a small shift to
trunks being connected on
telephony applications in a data
centre as opposed to on-premise
and we envisage the shift will
grow as more customers move to
hosted telephony.”
Ian Brindle, Head of UC
Device Sales at Nimans,
reminds us that SIP connectivity
obviously covers two areas; onpremise
and the cloud.
“With the ISDN switch o
looming this predominantly
a ects the on-premise arena
and leaves resellers and their
customers with a stark choice.
Do they upgrade their onpremise
systems to facilitate
SIP Trunks or do they deploy
SIP handsets in the cloud?
Commercially there’s a
crossroads ahead for lots of
Paul Wake eld, SIP Trunking
Product Manager at Gamma
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