Recently in sip trunking Category

Listened to XO to introduce Enterprise SIP (ESIP) to the Channel today. This offering is very targeted. Enterprise SIP is designed for multi-location customers such as Retail and Restaurant chains that are looking to get rid of PRI's.  

ESIP will be for high capacity connections with the minimum connection of 10MB at the hub (or HQ) for aggregated voice traffic. 

Essentially it is a SIP trunk (at 10MB) that will take all of the local and long distance traffic - inbound and outbound - from the branch offices across an MPLS (or other private network) through one or two hub circuits. 

Here's how it works.

You connect all of the offices together via a private network or MPLS architecture. Then you port all of the numbers to the SIP Trunking of XO's Enterprise SIP Service. The trunk will plug into an IP-PBX or an SBC and handle all of the voice traffic on the company network. All inbound and outbound voice traffic will utilize the ESIP Trunk.

A 10MB pipe will handle about 100 G.711 call streams (more or less). That means about 500 to 1000 extensions depending on the phone usage of the employees.

XO will even give Virtual-NXX numbers off this trunk. Although toll bypass is not allowed. 

The thing that surprised me the most was how specific the offering is. It's isn't for everyone. It was designed with a very particular market segment in mind - namely retail and restaurant chains.

The ESIP offering is designed to terminate on a Session Border Controller, IP-PBX or a Fax Server. 

Need to UPDATE that this is my take-away from the call. XO has many VoIP products and they want to match up the best solution for each customer. The ESIP is specifically for Multi-Location, MPLS-enabled customers. Not many companies need or can afford a Session Border Controller, so to me that is an indicator of the type of Enterprise that this offering i sdesigned for.

In speaking with Microcorp today about their agent event in October in Atlanta, we were discussing a panel on Trends for 2010.  It's not so much about the vendors, it's about the services that the vendors are offering that will become the next revenue stream for the channel.

This ties in with a TCA listserv discussion about Alternative Streams of Revenue for the Channel Agents. TCA will be hosting an agent call about Electricity with a couple of agents who have been selling electricity to businesses in unregulated states for a while. (Paetec offers this to agents as well).  Other topics include Web Strategy (like Lead Generation through Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Social Media Marketing); SAAS; 4G; the Cloud; and Managed Services.

It won't be enough to just sell TDM in the future, you will need partners to offer Telecom Expense Management (TEM) and Auditing as well as all the new services coming down the pipe (electricity, SAAS, cloud, 4G, VOIP, SIP Trunking, etc.). 

Maybe we are heading into Master Agency 2.0 - the dawn of an era when the master agent will have to be more than a collection of carrier contracts. What do you see that you might need from your Master Agency in the future? Let me know. Thanks.

Tech Data's Senior Product Sales Champion for UC was at the event last night. I spent a few minutes chatting with him about his position, but couldn't really get a definition of UC out of him. Polycom and tele-presence are what he pushes - to me that's not really UC. HD Voice? No we leave that up to Polycom and the vendors. Seems even a tech company has a problem wrapping the head around Unified Communications. (UC doesn't mean the latest gadgets).

XO has some components to build a UC bundle - overlay IVR, Broadsoft SIP Trunking, some straight forward Hosted PBX (with a limited feature set), and Hosted Exchange for the email integration piece.

If the UC Champion thinks UC is tele-presence and video conferencing, what does that say about well defined the term is in the Industry?

I received an invite yesterday from XO to come down to the Tech Data Expo at the Don Cesar Hotel in St. Petersburg FL. ADTRAN shared the booth with XO at this event. Surprisedly, the other two carriers that distribute through Tech Data had assigned booth space, but were absent. 

XO is a good fit for Tech Data. While I think the XO catalog is too large to know well - wireless, hosting, IP, VOIP, transport, collocation and more - the VAR's at Tech Data vary so much in what they do and what would complement their business that the wide selection helps - IF you can get in front of them and remind them throughout the year how they can take advantage of the additional revenue stream. 

For many VAR's the advantage of XO through Tech Data is that there's no contract (especially for those VAR's already under contract with Ma or Pa Bell) and with Tech Data as the "master agency", it isn't likely you need to worry about your residual check.  (And now that XO has converted their debt, it is in a good position going forward, which other debt laden CLEC's can't say).

Many VAR's are already in the PBX space and were asking about SIP. I wasn't sure if they actually grasp the concept of SIP or that they just know enough to be dangerous. The biggest difference between a PRI and a SIP Trunk is Inter-Operability. PRI is a standard with two available configurations that work with almost all the PBX's on the market. SIP Trunk is a spec - a collection of a lot of RFC's that have to work together just right to provide dial-tone. Broadsoft, the softswitch that XO is using, has tested inter-operability on many IP-PBX systems. Not so for other SIP Trunk vendors. So before you sell that SIP Trunk make certain that the IP-PBX model will inter-op with your SIP trunking vendor. It's a mess if it won't work.

This will be a strange post but Alex Balashov and I had a Twitter exchange today about the telecom industry and its relentless pursuit of arbitrage plays. From long distance to calling card to SIP trunking, it's all about changing the bucket of minutes for something cheaper so someone can make some short change coin. Kind of ridiculous.

I asked where the Purple Cows are. Where's the HD Voice in my Hosted PBX? Where's the mobile component that is stupid easy? 

Alex doesn't like Hosted PBX. "As for Broadsoft, it's an overpriced waste of time. Not because it sucks- it is a very feature complete multitenant engine...its cost simply doesn't scale to what people are willing to pay for hosted PBX and dial tone. Shot up by commoditization." 

I think that there are two camps: one that thinks Voice should be free - and I hear that more from folks IN telecom than from buyers. And these folks simply do not grasp the stranglehold that the ILEC's have on the PSTN, which for years to come will still be the network of the final mile to end user. Yes, cellular is large and cable voice is growing, but most of that traffic still resides on the ILEC operated PSTN. ENUM and Voice Peering domestically in the US has not  reached a level that will cripple the PSTN yet, luckily. (What will we do when that happens?)

The other camp will gladly pay to reliably and clearly communicate with family, friends and customers. 

Maybe I am in the minority but I can't hear folks well on Skype, Magic Jack or cell phones. I for one would like less computer features on my "smartphone" and better clarity, volume controls, and speaker. But that's just me.

Alex does make a good point that all ITSP's need to pay attention to: "No process, no standardisation, no infrastructure = no chance of making money, on something that is a red sea to begin with."  What's a Red Sea? A bloody marketplace built on price, not value. "Develop business processes that can be replicated at decreasing marginal cost, standardize." That at least helps when you live in a Red Ocean.

The Starbucks of Telecom. Who is it? Alex suggests that it is "Ifbyphone, Callfire, and various niche call center and dialer vendors (far from all)." And certainly these companies offer a value add on in a niche way. However, who is providing the dial-tone while delivering a communications experience? (I don't know). I have a laundry list of stuff I want from my Hosted PBX vendor:

• HD Voice
• Easy access on smartphone
• Easy transfer to/from mobile/desktop
• Presence
• Video capability
• IM/Chat
• Email-Voicemail Integrated mailbox
• Voicemail text 
• UM (unified messaging)
• User portal
• Click to call

Alex thinks that the Duopoly is getting better at delivering smaller transactions. I think that they still suck at it and it is costing them a fortune in acquisition cost. Then a fortune more in brand deterioration when people get frustrated with the experience. (Part of is it the B.S. marketing that they have been doing for years that raises the level of expectations to beyond the network to deliver. Can you say More Bars or No Dropped Calls or Best Network?)

Very few Purple Cows in our Industry. And if you think you are one, I suggest you talk to your customers. Why? Because while you may think you deliver a great service, your competitors are taking your customers.

Alex and I did agree that the way SIP Trunking is sold is yet another arbitrage play. "So, I think we agree - trunking in itself is a very mathematically exacting but mostly pointless waste of time.  As far as who captures the value in the non-enterprise VoIP space, you're absolutely right - the very few value-add vendors." 

It's food for thought from twitter.

Alex talks further about TDM - that it is still the winner in reliability, inter-operability, and call quality. 

"From a cost perspective that is a hard OPEX formula to meet. TDM is still the only reliable means of PSTN access. Stuff just doesn't work well. Eventually the smart ones widen up and get cheap TDM circuits, and ISDN gateway boxes. ... 90% of their technical overhead drops off, churn slows, but the margins take a dive unless they got a really good deal. "good deal" usually means meeting an IXC in a hotel and not paying loop on the circuit, just blended usage."

This leads me to wonder what ever happened to Voice Peering and ENUM? Well, one thing is that everyone wanted to start one. There wasn't just one. The rules and connection costs get in the way. Why didn't COMPTEL force its membership into a Voice Peering arrangement in 2005? Add in the Cable Industry, VoIP players, and Sprint's network of cellular minutes and you take a lot of the minutes out of the ILEC's PSTN. Costs drop. Or would they? Seems that the CLEC's would still want Inter-Carrier Compensation since some have this built into their financial model (as it were). Because Bell-heads (traditional telecom execs) don't think the same way that Net-Heads (IP execs) think. The settlement model would have to be forced on them. Even the FCC has balked at that for 10 years. 

Alex doesn't get my Peering point so let me spell it out further. Take Sprint as the manager of the Voice Peering Points in Dallas, NYC, LAX, CHI and maybe VA. CLEC's, cablecos, ITSP's could drop traffic either as TDM or IP on the switch and not pay for termination. A flat rate if you will. But Alex is correct that the settlement issues just won't float. Too many Bell-heads left in charge. 

To mean VoIP was able to take off for 3 reasons: broadband deployment, expensive TDM, and cellular acceptance of crappy call quality. We haven't come much further than that.

AireSpring launched an ad campaign tying in the latest Star Trek movie. The COO, Daniel Lonstein, is dressed up like Spock. Very creative ad.

Jon Arnold writes, "This year's MetaSwitch Forum provided a host of proof points that service providers of all stripes can stay competitive so long as they deploy the right technology and have the right vision for serving their customers."

Time and again, the pitch is about the company and the technology. Look at automobile reviews: It isn't about the engine size, it's about the 0-60. Telecommunications needs to do the same thing.

When Aastra talks about its AastraLink Pro 160, it should be about Asterisk. The story should be similar to the Aastra CT handset story. When anyone talks about the iPhone, do they mention that it only works on GSM or do they spend time talking about all the neat things they can do with it?  Same lesson.  I think that gadgets, handsets, phones and softphones can drive VoIP penetration, if they were easy to use (which they are), easy to add apps to, and did cool, useful things (for the consumer).

Take this example: "a food-service equipment innovator, Henny Penny, has deployed several Cisco Unified Communications solutions to improve customer service, streamline operations and enhance employee collaboration. ... Cisco Unified Contact Center Express and Cisco Unified MeetingPlace Express solutions are helping Henny Penny realize their business goals of getting their customers' issues solved more quickly and more simply than in the past."  The press release is kind of repetitive and vague. It should have said that Henny Penny used Cisco Unified Contact Center Express and Cisco Unified MeetingPlace Express in order to improve first call resolution, which has a direct impact on Henny Penny's bottom line. In addition, both the employee and the customer have seen an increase in satisfaction. Cisco's platform is a tool. The goal is to reduce costs by resolving customer service in one call, while improving customer satisfaction. This is what UC is all about. In fact, if you ever talk to John C. Kelly, Regional Vice President of Sales, North America, at Altitude Software, that's all that he is trying to accomplish for his clients - first call resolution. It's the goal of contact centers.

Another example is this Voxeo press release, which can help Human Resources departments with task resolution (like Self-service benefits enrollment, Job hotlines, Employee surveys and Employee notification messages) and efficiency especially now with job screening. These are concrete examples of what Voxeo IVR can provide. No tech talk. Just end user benefit.

The last example today will be Sprint's UC announcement.  SIP trunking over Global MPLS network. Yawn! The release did mention Sprint's 3 global partners: Cisco for mobile integration; IBM Sametime Unified Telephony; and Microsoft's OCS 2007 R2. The only case study: Sprint's internal deployment of unified communications and its $6 million annual cost savings, visit www.sprint.com/whitepapers.

When trying to market or sell UC, forget all that tech talk and tell a story about the customer. It's all about the customer. Their pain. Your solution.

What's the perfect VoIP Service?

I have seen so many VoIP Providers, I can't keep track. But that also means that the VoIP providers are not doing a very good job of Messaging, Positioning and Differentiating their offerings.

The only VoIP provider I know that has married Hosted Exchange with Broadsoft is Simple Signal. It makes to me because what is UM (unified messaging) but voicemail to email - everything in one box.

Unison Offers VoIP, E-Mail, IM to SMBs in New York City

Google Voice does it as well. One inbox for Gmail and Google Voice. And GV has some nice features like a transcript of your voicemail; recording calls;

Recently, I read that a company had instituted a who-is-calling-please response into every call before th ephone rings. I love this! No more dumb dialers. No more UNKNOWN or OUT OF AREA on the Caller ID.

Quick rant: I pay Verizon $22.35 for Worksmart which includes Caller ID, but most of the time it is Unknown. WTH? How does it not even known when AT&T calls me? Or almost any other CLEC? Lazy. That's why you are losing customers.

Presence (not to be confused with tele-presence) was supposed to integrate IM/chat, email, mobile and desktop phone. I haven't seen much of that in real world implementation. (I understand why, but I'm just pointing it out).  Skype does a decent job of video, voice or chat - plus recording.

Broadsoft has allowed many ITSP's to hook to SalesForce.com. Why not offer a hosted CRM software that is married to your PBX and email offering? VoIP is just one application.

• HD Voice
• conference-on-demand (web and video)
• call blocking
• Portal as easy as AT&T CallVantage
• call logs that can match up caller ID

Obvously, the usual features are still a must-have, including:

• simultaneous ring
• find-me-follow-me
• 3-way calling
• caller ID
• voicemail
• vm-to-email
• call forwarding
• Do Not Disturb

Chime in. I would love to hear from you:

• what you are doing
• who has the best message
• are you a cutting edge ITSP

UPDATE:
M5 announced that the marriage of the M5 Genband-based Hosted PBX with SalesForce.com and Call Metrics has been a hit.

John Todd is an Asterisk evangelist and works for Digium. VoIP Users Conference reposted John's 7 steps to better SIP Security on Asterik (here). The reason for the 7 steps now?

"In the last few months, a number of new tools have made it easy for knuckle-draggers to attack and defraud SIP endpoints, Asterisk-based systems included. There are easily-available tools that scan networks looking for SIP hosts, and then scan hosts looking for valid extensions, and then scan valid extensions looking for passwords. You can take steps, NOW, to eliminate many of these problems."

It's not just Asterisk either. There are holes in every PBX and softswitch. There is long distance fraud, especially in International calling. You should be checking your CDR's at least daily - or run a script to pick up anomalies.

Security in entirety will become extremely important this year. New tools; a tanking world economy; criminals will be looking for every lever to make money or get something free.  So will disgruntled employees, so network admins need to be on top of any changes in human resources.

SUTUS, the maker's of the Business Central 200 office-in-a-box, have announced inter-operability with Excel SIP Trunking.  The real news for the marketplace is that Excel and SUTUS (along with Polycom) are bundling a system for small business.

The Business Central 200 is developed specifically for businesses of up to 25 employees, Sutus Business Central™ comprises a wide array of advanced telephony, data and networking functions. It includes a business-class phone system, file server, email server, router, firewall, wireless access point, VPN remote access server, and automated backups. It has the ability to simultaneously support both standard phone line and VoIP connections and comes with an array of business productivity features. Now VARs can get the office-in-a-box at almost no cost with a SIP bundle from Excel.

The interoperability allows resellers to provide their small business customers with a guaranteed low cost, reliable and full-featured IT and telephony bundle that is unmatched in the market.  It also allows the channel to better service small businesses due to the Business Central's advanced built-in remote support features. Tech support that would previously have required a truck roll can now be handled remotely by basic support staff.

Steve Weltner, Director Product Development at Excel, is excited about Excel's new SIPpbx Equipment Upgrade Program. He comments, "affordability is a non-factor as the device ends up being virtually free."

"With economic tough times facing everyone there has never been a time where pricing and simplicity have been more important," said Shawn Chute Executive Vice President of Sutus, "Excel and Sutus have come together to deliver on both these fronts, providing the small business customer and the channel that services them with an affordable, comprehensive and straight forward communications and IT bundle. One price, one solution, one contact point, we have made it as simple as it can be to subscribe to a fully integrated solution."

For resellers interested in this Sutus Excel program please contact Sutus at www.sutus.com or 778-371-5286. You may also contact Steve Weltner Director of Marketing at Excel at 972-910-1763.