"Demand for residential and business VoIP services continues to grow through the economic downturn because of the cost savings they provide. As a result, in 2008 the VoIP services market had healthy growth of 33% to $30.8 billion. For the first 3 months of 2009, service providers experienced an average of 40% to 50% year-over-year growth for IP Centrex, indicating the demand for outsourcing and managed solutions remains healthy. We expect hosted UC services to take off, with worldwide revenue doubling between 2009 and 2013, and we forecast SIP Trunking service revenue to hit an 89% compound annual growth rate from 2008 to 2013," said Diane Myers, Directing Analyst, Service Provider VoIP and IMS, Infonetics Research.

Based on these promising industry statistics, SIP Trunking is well positioned for growth, but how can a service provider best position themselves to take advantage of this potentially lucrative market while minimizing the downside? Providers can easily enter the market by providing IP origination and termination services over fractional virtual lines, however, the provider also needs to be aware of the back office management of the service and be very concerned with mitigating his exposure to fraud and account delinquency. Today, most carriers collect the CDRs in a historical post-call manner then rate the CDRs to generate line item charges and then mediate all of the information into a customer bill. This process takes times, is highly susceptible to fraud, human error, capacity overruns, orphaned records, collection issues and bad debt -- all issues that weigh heavily on the business and drive up administration overheads while reducing profitability.

Luckily there is a better way to manage SIP Trunking services and it is through the adoption of real-time authorization, rating, routing and billing technology. By operating the SIP Trunking service in real-time in the front-end and back-end of the network the service provider can reduce fraud, increase profitability and reduce administration overhead through real-time balance updating, up-to-the-second credit checks, multiple layers of call traffic authentication, sophisticated real-time rating and billing and granular routing. With the addition of real-time authentication, rating, routing and billing functionality, the service provider can offer prepaid/postpaid/limited credit and flat-rate billing programs to even the most credit-challenged customers with the security of knowing their exposure is capped. With real-time SIP Trunking the carrier will have greater peace of mind knowing that safeguards are in place, slow and uncollectible accounts are eliminated, a wider profile of customers can be serviced and the human resource burden has been significantly reduced through the latitude, flexibility and control that real-time services bring to the next-generation network.

For additional information, see IVR's SIP Trunking application page.