Technical

SIP Trunking Explained

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If you know very little about telecommunications but have some basic understanding of the Voice over IP technology – you will have no trouble grasping the concept of SIP trunking. Understanding why DLS chooses not to offer this service may take some explaining.

Understanding Trunking

The word “Trunk” has more than one meaning but in communications it came to represent a concept of a part that can be divided into branches and vice versa. More specifically, the term “trunk” is used to describe a transmission channel between two switching systems. Such transmission channel could be comprised of one or more communications circuits. When you think about public switched telephone network (PSTN), you imagine many different telephone switches all connected to each ot

her using trunks. Each trunk would typically consist of multiple trunk lines. Trunk sizes vary depending on how many trunk lines are in it.

Since the 1970s telecom services largely relied on the technology called TDM (Time Division Multiplexing). This technology allowed delivery of fixed number of voice channels per digital circuit. For example: T-1 circuit would contain 24 channels, PRI – 23 channels, etc.  Each channel could be used for voice or data. This technology represented a significant leap from the analog switches because it allowed delivery of multiple channels over a 4-wire connection eliminating costly requirement for individual copper pairs to be run from the central office switch. A business could purchase a digital circuit(s) and pool some or all of its channels into trunk. These channels would then be referred to as “trunk lines”.

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VoIP Bandwidth: Quality vs. Quantity

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Digital leased lines are no longer the favorites of bandwidth-hungry businesses. As many alternative sources of affordable Internet bandwidth became available, dedicated point-to-point leased lines begun to fall out of favor with many small businesses. Their relatively high cost, by today’s standards, per megabit of bandwidth make them unattractive in comparison to the generous shared bandwidth offers from various telecommunications and cable carriers. That said, it seems like rumors of their rapid demise are being greatly exaggerated. T-1 lines, for example, seem to be entering their 7th life as market for them is getting sudden support by those who had to deal with at least one DSL or Cable outage.

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What VoIP Readiness Assessment Does Not Tell You

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In the previous posts I had covered many obvious business reasons driving business VoIP adoption in the enterprise including costs savings, productivity increases, and image benefits. These benefits are typically enabled by VoIP infrastructure on a converged network, but achieved through IP telephony applications such as messaging, conferencing and geographic independence.

Realizing VoIP Hosted PBX benefits can be a challenge, and organizations may experience frustration, stress and even despair as they work to deploy it in their environments. Generally speaking, VoIP is much more than just another application on the network, and most organizations have never managed an application with high availability and performance requirements like those of VoIP.

The only real way to ensure lasting trouble free voice quality in an enterprise VoIP Hosted PBX deployment is through proper management of all of the devices within network path between the endpoint device (be it a handset, computer or a softphone) and a VoIP Hosted PBX service provider system.

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Hosted PBX Toll Fraud Attacks: Phreaking

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Phreaking (or phone hacking, toll fraud, dial-through fraud) is not new. In the not too distant past it was often a domain of adolescents with modems, phone lines and a PCs looking to make a couple of calls on someone else’s tab to their friends out of state or, sometimes, out of the country. Those call volumes often went unnoticed in the overall vast number of calls on company’s phone bill.

Toll Fraud

But phreaking in this day and age has moved from geek to something more sinister and more damaging. Telephone phreaking of Internet era is a big business run by an organized crime. What’s also interesting is that telecommunications carriers reap substantial benefits from these activities by demanding payments for the tidal wave of illegal call traffic phreakers generate at the victim’s expense. Some insiders hint that phreaking is telecommunication’s industry’s biggest dirty secret, generating massive funding for carriers.

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Launching VARs and ISVs into a VoIP Cloud

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If memory serves me correctly, five years ago, we used to position VoIP versus traditional PSTN-based dialtone. Then came the hosted concept and theme focus has turned to an on-premise VoIP versus Hosted VoIP. Today we are seeing hosted PBX service providers beginning to further differentiate themselves by targeting niche vertical markets by building on their application integration capabilities.

Hosted PBX price wars are continuing to heat up for the fourth year. The biggest battleground appear to be the growing small business market where integration capabilities coupled with soft entry costs are playing a dominant role in SMB’s choice of a unified communications platform. Most small businesses prefer to gradually increase their operating expenses while gaining immediate access to the critical unified communications technology rather than incurring a large one-time capital expense.

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Hosted PBX 3.2 moving into Alpha testing next week

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We are excited to be wrapping up feature development for 3.2. There is still a lot of testing and work to be done before this version makes it to public release, but there are a lot of exciting new features in here. Display parking lot number on call status page Improved Parking Lot system Integrated … Read more

Chat Service added to Hosted PBX 3.2

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Greetings, As I mentioned in my previous blog post about 3.2, one of the new features that we wanted to add to version 3.2 of the Hosted PBX was a corporate chat service. I am pleased to announce that the implementation of this service has been completed, so we will definately be bringing this new … Read more

QoS: Panacea or Snake Oil?

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IT and Telecom professionals have long been infatuated with the concept commonly referred to as QoS (which stands for Quality of Service). Of course ensuring that Voice over IP meets high voice quality requirements is a key concern when it comes to designing networks. New QoS protocols: Differentiated Services (DiffServ), the Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) and the once almost forgotten Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) have been designed by some of the brightest minds in IP networking and data processing.

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