Many of us in the industry live VoIP, and live VoIP even more. As such, some people are surprised that people still have kitchen phones, that telephone poles still exist, and that gateways are still out there. They think the whole world is on SIP and IP already. And really, in just a short 20 years, the landline and mobile world has changed immensely.
There are many ways to look at how far industry has come, or how far it still has to go to be fully on IP. One way is to look at the penetration of SIP Trunks. An enterprise using SIP Trunks would signal a big move to IP communications. According to IHS Markit, the worldwide SIP trunking revenue totaled $3.3B in the first half of 2017, growing 12%. And in the same timespan, SIP Trunk seats increased 26% to 30 Million seats. And according to TechNavio, the SIP trunking market is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 18% from 2017 to 2021. And this just isn’t in the United States, the leading SIP Trunking market. According to Frost and Sullivan, the Indian SIP Trunking market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 31% from 2017 to 2022.
So why the use of SIP Trunks to begin with? First of all, the driver for VoIP to begin with was IT cost savings and the promise of richer communication offerings. And that has proven to be true. So it is inevitable that the ITSP would start to become involved and hence the move to a SIP Trunk instead of a PSTN trunk. Even more cost savings (given ethernet was already coming into the building). So this elimination of the PSTN network and IT infrastructure is a huge driver.
Next week I will explore more reasons for the rise of SIP Trunking.
