Business owners are often looking for ways to reduce costs and reappropriate funds to invest in their businesses. You are responsible for overseeing and managing many aspects of your business. These include advertising, payroll, shipping services, and merchant services. Perhaps you aren’t the most tech-savvy business owner, or your day-to-day schedule has not afforded you the time to become proficient at every aspect of your business.
Maybe you have or haven’t heard of SIP trunking. Perhaps a friend or colleague uses it for their business. If you haven’t had a chance to look into how SIP trunking turns voicemails into emails and allows for phone communication and video chat, let’s discuss that now.
SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol. It’s a way you achieve a voice-over IP, known as a VoIP call. It’s an application layer protocol that sets up real-time sessions of audio or video between two phones. SIP is the technology that creates, changes, and ends sessions with one or more participants in an IP network. This can be in the form of either a two-way call or a multi-party conference call.
Other Uses for SIP Trunking
You are also able to use SIP trunking for long-distance calls. It may also be used for sending emails, text messages, and browsing the internet. You may also use it to host and engage in video chats. A PBX, or Private Branch Exchange, is an IP-enabled private system within an enterprise that switches calls and information between two or more users using local lines while allowing them to use existing external phone lines. This reduces the cost for each user by avoiding the requirement for each of them to have a phone line to their local telephone company’s main office.
People considering this option often wonder, “How many phone calls or video chats can I engage in at one time using this method?” Call limitations are based upon the available internet bandwidth, which is usually slower than the download speed on the upload end. Each phone call uses approximately 85 to 100 kilobytes per second (Kbps) of your bandwidth. This means you can calculate the limitations of your system as long as you know your upload rate.
For example, if your upload speed is 5 megabits per second (Mbps), you could expect your system to reasonably be able to handle 50 simultaneous calls. Suppose you know the number of concurrent calls during your busiest times. In that case, you can multiply that by 100 Kbps to determine your required bandwidth needed by using this formula: Number of concurrent calls during peak hours x 100 Kbps = Necessary bandwidth. You can also opt for an on-premises PBX, and then the number of concurrent calls you can make is unlimited.
Consider SIP trunking for your business needs. It’s a wonderful technological option that can provide cost-effective communications options for your small or large business.