SIP Trunking: 5 Best Ways to Improve Your System

While many top-rated companies embrace the latest solutions for problem-solving, many have yet to embrace the power of SIP trunking. Those who have know that improving your SIP trunking is important to ensure that your system meets the needs of your customers at all hours of the day. If you’re worried about uptime, call quality, or overusing your bandwidth running multiple lines of video, you need to make sure you take some precautions.

Here are the five most important things you can do to take care of your SIP trunks and maintain connectivity. 

1. Have a Business Continuity Plan

Installing SIP trunks allows a business to have the maximum amount of connectivity to meet their needs. As businesses grow and scale, SIP trunks allow for the widest range of features available to the highest number of users.

Find a provider that offers continuity for your voice and data services. They should have multiple redundant data centers so that if a problem occurs at one, calls are automatically routed to another. It is also essential that only Tier-1 carrier networks are used to deliver calls. 

Aside from a data center problem, another potential point of failure is the loss of power at the location of your PBX. In this case, your SIP provider should be able to help you set up an automatic failover to another location or a backup PBX system.

2. Choose the Right SIP Provider

Once you’ve got your SIP trunk up and running, you might think that you’re good to go. However, not all SIP trunk providers are created equally. VoIP relies on SIP for inbound and outbound calls via global networks.

That means there’s no reason to have all of your calls routed through a single location. You could have your data dispersed across a wide range of servers spread out all over the world.

SIP trunks allow for dramatic cost savings while bundling up SMS, fax, calling, and other connectivity. Watch out for pricing with SIP providers, however. Just because someone is offering a deal doesn’t mean that they’re offering good service. 

Least-cost routing or LCR is a way for SIP providers to route calls as cheaply as possible. This means that they’ll cut corners on bandwidth, quality, and service. If you’re using an inexpensive provider, don’t expect them to pull through when things get hectic.

3. Implement QoS

Quality-of-Service on a network is vital to prioritize your data. Different types of data have different needs. Degradation on one channel might allow the data to remain useful while degradation on another might lose you a sail.

High priority traffic will get the kind of attention it needs as its data packets will be assured to reach their destination at a set time. VoIP calls are divided up into data packets so it’s important that you manage this jitter and latency before you get started.

If your network doesn’t have a QoS setup, then your internal network will offer weak user experiences. Your customers will report dissatisfaction and it could hurt your reputation. When reputations are under fire, it can hurt the bottom line of even the most active customer service team.

4. Secure Your Setup

Properly securing data sent via SIP trunks from hackers is vital, especially if you work in certain professional sectors. It also ensures that you don’t suffer any outages from attempts by nefarious parties to take over your system.

First, if you work in the financial sector or in medicine, you need your data to be secured. Lack of security could violate regulations and result in fines or a loss of your license. Being unable to operate because of a data leak could lead to catastrophic results for your company.

Secondly, hackers have been more active than ever in recent years. As it’s become easier than ever to pull off a data breach, it’s no longer only large corporations suffering hacks. Small businesses are becoming victims as well.

Consider using a SIP proxy service to route requests to your users’ locations. They will authorize and authenticate data and user logins to ensure that everyone is properly accounted for. This keeps out any unwanted actors or anyone you’ve never done business with.

5. Check the MOS

Measuring the quality of your SIP trunks and VoIP service is a must. Talking to an IT professional or your service provider can offer you a MOS score. The Mean Opinion Score is the system for qualifying the quality of user experience at networks. 

A higher score means that the quality of service feels as good as a face-to-face conversation. The scale runs from 1 to 5, with a benchmark of 4 being a merely acceptable result.

When you take the time to check the quality of service before you subject your clients to it, you assure them that they’re getting what they expect. You ensure that you’re only providing quality that you would expect from a service provider.

Improving Your SIP Trunking Means Preparation

Improving your SIP trunking is a challenge for any business that’s just made the leap. Over time, it’s much easier to implement some of the standards and practices that keep your SIP trunks running smoothly, so be patient.

If you need a reminder of the benefits of SIP over traditional telephony, check out our guide.