If your company is based in the UK you may want to look into switching your ISDN lines. Gavin Patterson BT Group CEO has said that in less than nine years BT will be switching off their ISDN lines and moving everybody onto SIP.
“We already serve many thousands of customers in businesses using IP, our goal is by 2025 all of our voice customers will be served using an IP with a premises solution and will migrate off the traditional telephony platform.”
What does this News mean?
This news from BT means that in nine years time all traditional phone lines will be sent over the internet or SIP trunks as they’re more commonly called. So if you’re currently looking to renew your contract, change your provider or install a new phone system it’s would be a good idea to consider SIP now.
Not Long to Wait
2025 is only nine years away and it really is worth considering a switch to SIP now or at the end of your next contract. As the ISDN switch off draws nearer, support for ISDN will begin to drop until it eventually ends or gets very expensive, I believe it is best to make the switch to SIP now or within the next couple of years. Don’t take out a new, expensive ISDN contract that will be obsolete before you know it. Make the change now and you will start to see many benefits including real cost savings.
What are the benefits of SIP?
SIP trunking is scalable, cheaper and more flexible than ISDN. The work place is changing at a rate of knots, many of us now have the flexibility to work from home or even when we are on the move. Your calls can be delivered to your smart phone, PC, tablet or whatever compatible device you choose and it is SIP that allows us to do this.
The switch to SIP will also change the way you look at disaster recovery, with a hosted SIP solution you can invoke an emergency call plan as soon as disaster strikes. SIP will help to keep your business up and running, staff will be able to work from home or from another location.
SIP is relatively simple and straight forward to get started with but there are a few things to consider.
- Provider – There’s a lot of providers of SIP around and the number is only going to grow, take your time, shop around, research the various providers and make sure the one you choose can deliver an end to end service for your business.
- Handsets – SIP means you will need new handsets but these bring many benefits. Once they have been programmed with the number they can be plugged in and make or take calls anywhere.
- Migration of your current numbers – Migrating numbers is something your new provider should be able to do easily.
- Testing – Choose a good provider and they will make sure everything works as part of their service. Don’t try cuting corners and then end up in a state on switch-over day.
- Support? Support is crucial, do your research and make sure you’re covered.
Unified Communications
An IP based infrastructure will enable you to unify your communications. You may have heard the term unified communications before, it’s been around a while. A unified communications system will enable your company to integrate data, video and voice.
This post was written and supplied by Peter Harris, Peter works for Interact, London based unified communication experts.
