SIP trunking’s popular, but still not for everyone

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One pervasive theme in the VoIP industry over the last 12 months has been the emergence of SIP trunking. While I never have and still don’t like the name, I can’t argue with the fact that SIP trunking has grown in stature of late.

But, is SIP trunking really driving service providers of all shapes and sizes to get into VoIP?

A lot of experts, pundits, bloggers and vendors would like you to believe that – unfortunately it isn’t true.

Take your regional ISP. You’d think that they’d be foaming at the mouth to offer SIP trunking services to their existing business customers. After all, it’s another revenue source for them – possibly even a way to steal customers from a larger player.

Yet, regional ISP’s aren’t rolling out SIP trunking services with the fervor you might think (or that others want you to believe).

In talking with a number of regional ISP’s, the reason for their hesitation is actually quite simple – the access business is much different then the voice service business. In other words, selling and supporting access is a different business then selling and supporting voice service.

Most regional ISP’s are small, meaning they have limited resources. From what they tell me, even at it’s cheapest, offering SIP trunking services would in many cases do more then good for their business.

Selling and supporting access for most of them is fairly cheap. They don’t have to have much by way of advanced technical support and they rarely have to worry about “quality” – the Internet either works or it doesn’t. With SIP trunking, however, there is a need for robust technical support and of course voice quality is always going to be a concern.

When you factor this in, many regional ISP’s are cautious about the move towards offering SIP trunking. They simply don’t have the resources or compelling reasons to add a revenue stream that changes how they do business (and their overhead costs).

So while SIP trunking might continue to be on the forefront of much of the VoIP industry’s minds, not everyone is that excited. Guess it just goes to show that some times what looks good on paper