Aastra’s IntellliGate switches have been supporting SIP Trunks for over three years now but with the UK lacking a household name to push the service, until recently, reluctance from both resellers and the business community was halting progress.
Opal has now entered the market and with many of you actively dealing with them already this will simplify the SIP trunk business.
There are several key reasons to use SIP Trunks:
Porting of BT numbers
The most cost effective and simple way of enabling customers to keep their existing number when moving or shutting down an office.
Presence – new numbers
The ability to provide customers with new geographic numbers, where they have no physical presence.
Resilience, diverse routing, disaster recovery
SIP Trunks can be provided on any IntelliGate system as back up to analogue, ISDN 2 or ISDN30 connection.
Resilience and diverse routing as the SIP Trunk will be delivered over a PSTN line whereas the ISDN PRA is quite likely to be a separate routing.
Disaster recovery is possible by routing incoming and outgoing calls across the SIP Trunk in the event of the loss of the ISDN PRA.
SIP Trunk – supplier status
Aastra has been working with many different suppliers over the years but at present the only fully tested service available is VoiceFlex from Frontier.
Opal use the Voiceflex platform so no testing is taking place for this service.
We are awaiting the go ahead to test Gamma Telecom’s new platform and will provide details as soon as possible.
Note
No other services have been tested or qualified for connection to IntelliGate and Aastra will not take technical responsibility for any service it has not tested.
Should you wish to work with a particular partner supplying SIP Trunks please email me with full details so that any testing can be scheduled to take place.
It cannot be assumed the service will work with IntelliGate if it works with another PBX as SIP is still an evolving standard open to interpretation.
Only by fully testing the service can we ensure compatibility.
Conclusion
SIP Trunks have come of age as other manufacturers and now a supplier are promoting their use. The more that do so the better but as Aastra’s experience with SIP technology as a whole is second to none we are confident in our offerings.
Mike Ballantine
Business Development Manager