SIP providers offer more services than you might think

As with any evolving industry, there’s quite a bit of confusion in the VoIP world about the specific meanings of certain words. This is because of a lack of standardization of offerings and the fact that new
services are being developed all the time. While this phase is great for
the industry in terms of innovation, it's also understandably confusing.

What does it mean to be a provider of SIP services?

SIP trunking

The term “SIP Provider”, for example, means different things depending on who is using it. It has its roots in “SIP Trunking” which is a service provided to businesses that allows them to connect their in house IP PBX systems to the outside world - the public switched telephone network or PSTN. Without it, devices within a PBX can only talk to other devices on the same network or using the same system. The Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP) however, gives such firms a pipe or a “trunk” which makes the connection to the PSTN, thereby exponentially increasing the reach and usefulness of their PBXs. One example of a SIP trunking service is our own, pstn.junctionnetworks.com.

This is the most common definition of an SIP provider as of now. But recently lots of new entrants to the field are offering innovative services making use of the SIP protocol as a backbone. These nimble ITSPs are able to build on the traditional SIP trunk service and create entirely new business models. These new “SIP Providers” are changing the face of the VoIP industry.

Hosted SIP

While a SIP trunk only caters to firms who already have their own IP PBX system built and ready to hook up to the PSTN, the latest breed of SIP providers don’t require even that. These ITSPs have their own PBXs hosted on their servers and allow businesses to make use of them in order to receive VoIP services at extremely low costs. 'Hosted PBX' services come with built-in connections to the PSTN network, eliminating the need to purchase it separately.

“Hosted PBX” providers are like a web hosting service. A business owns a website, but doesn’t own the servers on which that site is stored. Neither does it have its own colocation facilities to house those servers. Instead, they use the resources of a web host like GoDaddy or Bluehost. This makes it easy for the smallest businesses or even a private blogger to maintain their own website.

Of course, every SIP Provider offering hosted PBX services will also provide traditional trunking services since it’s a subset of their existing operations.

There are also many SIP services which are targeted towards private individuals such as sip2sip.info and getonsip.com. These offerings allow people to get their own SIP address for free. Sip2sip.info offers a PSTN connection while getonsip is currently SIP only, meaning you can only make calls to SIP addresses.

Additional Benefits for Hosted SIP customers

SIP hosting does the same thing with VoIP communications by putting it within the reach of firms who have no SIP infrastructure of their own. These new SIP Providers are redefining what it means to provide an SIP service. Along with the ability to make VoIP calls, businesses get SIP accounts to distribute to their employees. This means that anyone using a SIP device can call them for free as long as they know the SIP address associated with that account.

An SIP address looks just like an email ID. By default, the domain of the email - the part just before the “.com” will belong to the ITSP providing the service. When we host your VoIP communications, your SIP address will look something like “employeename@yourcompany.onsip.com.” However, we also give you the ability to change the SIP address domain to match the corporate email ID which your employees use. If you have access to the DNS records (and you certainly should,) your SIP address will simply be your email ID.

This page expands on an earlier blog post by Rob, 'What is a SIP service Provider?'