2013
SIP to overtake T1 lines in the enterprise by 2015, predicts Infonetics
The percentage of enterprises using SIP trunking will surpass the percentage using legacy T1 lines in 2015, according to a survey of close to 300 firms by Infonetics Research.
Those who do not plan to deploy SIP trunking said they liked their existing voice services or that their existing service contract was not up for renewal.
For most of the enterprises using SIP trunking, the PBX connection is made natively; fewer than one-third make the connection using premise-based enterprise session border controllers (eSBCs), according to the survey.
"SIP trunking adoption is growing as businesses seek to improve the reliability and lower the cost of communication services. That said, though more and more companies are implementing SIP trunking, it is far from being the ubiquitous standard of T1 lines or ISDN circuits. T1 lines are still the most commonly used trunking service today, and while their use is declining, our survey shows that North American businesses are using a combination of services; there isn't going to be a 100 percent cutover from T1 to SIP," observed Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics and author of the study.
The Infonetics results jive with a survey conducted last year by Webtorials on behalf of Sonus Networks (Nasdaq: SONS). That survey of close to 300 enterprises found that enterprises are increasingly deploying SIP trunks, with one-third already having SIP trunks in place.
The shift by enterprises to SIP trunking reflects a broader move by the entire telecom infrastructure toward IP-based networks. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held earlier this year, Hank Hultquist, AT&T's vice president of regulatory affairs, predicted that the transition to an all-IP network would occur by the end of the decade.
Hultquist stressed that it is getting harder to find equipment to maintain legacy networks based on time-division multiplexed (TDM) technology used in T1 lines and other legacy equipment. "The telephone network we all grew up with is now an obsolete platform… that will not be sustainable for the indefinite future. No one is making this network technology any more. It will become increasingly difficult to find spare parts for it. And it is becoming more and more difficult to find trained technicians and engineers to work on it," he told the CES audience.
