SIP trunking deployments have evolved to meet the needs of a changing telecommunications industry. Larger deployments with higher numbers of sessions are on the rise. Today, typical deployments handle between 50 and 1,000 concurrent sessions or calls, addressing the needs of medium- to large-sized business looking to adopt secure VoIP over SIP trunks.

Recently even these numbers have started to increase dramatically, especially among call centers adopting SIP trunking to lower costs and to easily provide for remote call agents. The cost differential between traditional telephony and VoIP is astounding – for call centers making hundreds or thousands of calls a day, the cost savings can pay for equipment upgrades in a year or less.

With SIP trunking, call centers can also provide customers with enterprise-class real-time services such as click-to-talk and instant messaging. This is a significant competitive advantage.

Cloud deployments are also on the rise. One Ingate customer, a data center, is deploying cloud-based SIP trunking first in Europe, then rolling it out globally. Cloud-based services are beneficial for customers that want the flexibility of serving a wide geographical market from a central location. For their clients, hosted SIP trunking is an opportunity to leverage this technology with lower startup costs, and minimized maintenance costs. It’s a win-win for everyone.

The cable industry is also providing SIP trunks to business customers. For them, SIP trunking is an expedient way to service a large market with low-cost, high-margin telephony solutions.

The fact that SIP trunking has evolved to become truly enterprise-class has fueled these kinds of deployments. Today, cable operators are installing in multi-site companies supporting thousands of SIP sessions. At Ingate, we recently debuted a new SIParator Enterprise Session Border Controller that can handle up to 20,000 calls to fill the increasing demand for large-scale deployments and offer two of our high-end hardware models with DC power as an option, for installation in telephony environments and to provide for longer battery backup times.

Dovetailing with the surge in SIP trunking deployments is the increasing focus on WebRTC. Many industry experts agree that WebRTC and SIP trunking will go hand in hand. We look forward to this next evolution in telecom.

Steven Johnson is president of Ingate Systems (News - Alert) (www.ingate.com).