ATSI Blog

What is SIP Trunking?

SIP trunking involves using the Internet as a business phone system. Instead of using a traditional phone line, a business gets to take advantage of the numerous features that are only available in the digital online space.

SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol. SIP uses a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) connector which allows you to connect to multiple channels, or lines, at once. The legacy PBX structure is fast becoming obsolete on its own, but with SIP trunking, the technology is making a comeback.

How Does It Work?

The center of SIP trunking is the SIP provider. The SIP provider gives you the same service as a phone services provider. SIP takes advantage of VoIP within LAN networks to give you connections to IP phones.

No organizational leaders like to think that a disaster will strike their company and cause it to lose some or all of its data. Unfortunately, this happens to businesses around the country every day. Those who prepare for it can recover with minimal business disruption and loss of income, while those who do not could find it impossible to operate the same way again. If you expect your company to be among those who recover quickly, creating a business continuity plan is essential.

Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) are becoming the choice of organizations the world over. There are major advantages to choosing an SD-WAN instead of a WAN for your networks, including lowered cost, deployment speed and better use of bandwidth.

In this gig economy, people are just as likely to work remotely at hours convenient to them as they are to head downtown every morning for a 9-to-5 job. For as convenient as it can be, it also presents challenges such as collaboration among teams who may live and work thousands of miles apart. At ATSI Business Communication Systems, we help businesses establish and troubleshoot problems with cloud-based employees and independent contractors.

“The cloud” is a popular term used in the tech industry. You may have heard tech companies saying data is in the cloud, or someone can work in the cloud. They are not referring to the beautiful, white, fluffy formations seen in the sky. The data is not actually in the natural clouds found in the sky, but in terrestrial places.

Various wireless mediums have no doubt made our lives easier and more convenient in a wide range of different ways over the years — but they certainly aren't perfect. Wireless transmissions, especially RF transmissions, are both noisy and unreliable by their very nature. In an effort to provide reliable data delivery, to control access to a naturally shared medium and to protect the integrity of the data being delivered in the first place, companies use techniques like the Clear Channel Assessment to help accomplish all of these things and more.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), technology that allows computers and robots to "think" and make decisions beyond their programming, is much more than just a fad. This technology will displace more than 500,000 jobs in the next two years, according to Forbes magazine, and a recent McKinsey & Company study found that more than half of today's jobs will be redundant by 2055. There are few places where this is more apparent than in the IT industry. AI is clearly changing the landscape of IT departments around the globe. However, while AI may be responsible for shifting workers, it is also opening opportunities for those in the IT industry.

When was the last time you upgraded your phone system? 7 years ago? 10 years ago? Or was it so long ago you’re not quite sure? Your aging phone system may be costing more than you think. Not only do you have higher resource costs, higher maintenance costs, infrastructure costs – you also have outdated features, limited mobility capabilities, and fragmented applications and tools. The total costs of not having a unified communications solution to support your business and your customers is likely dragging your organization down.

You’ve realized that your current phone system is no longer working for your growing business.  So you do what any savvy business person does – you research your options. And you quickly comprehend that what you need is a phone system that will minimize disruptions to your business and integrate with your current custom applications, all at a reasonable cost. Most importantly, you want to be able to control how you use, manage and pay for the phone system over the long term. It might be time to consider a telephone platform that gives you total control in three critical manners.  

As the needs of today’s business become increasingly complex, so do the jobs of network and systems administrators. When designing their organization’s IT architecture, they must consider the need for security, redundancy and uptime, not to mention the impact of business process applications such as ERP and CRMon servers and phone systems.