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The SIP trunking services market has grown steadily for years as more companies migrate from legacy PBX and telco services. It helps that SIP trunking is typically less expensive than legacy circuits.
The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t slowed demand; the widespread move to remote working is boosting SIP’s fortunes. And more businesses are adopting SIP trunking as they switch to UCaaS.
Erin Christianson is executive vice president of sales at Avant.
Avant’s Erin Christianson
“Customers are looking for flexibility around solutions being offered around all types of voice consumption,” he said. “They are looking for per-user pricing models, flexible terms for marketing campaigns and/or shorter-term projects. Vendors and partners need to provide solutions that meet the customers needs if they want to win the business.”
According to Global Industry Analysts, amid the pandemic, the global market for SIP trunking services is worth $8.2 billion this year. It should reach $15.2 billion by 2027; that’s a compound annual growth rate of more than 9%.
Significant Uptick During COVID-19
Michael Brandenburg is senior industry analyst of connected work at Frost & Sullivan.
Frost and Sullivan’s Michael Brandenburg
“Many SIP trunking providers have reported a significant scaling of services in the early days of the pandemic,” he said. “Many of the providers have responded by looking inward and removing some internal workflow barriers to address customer needs; for example, allowing customers to deploy services over the top (OTT) rather than needing a WAN link from the provider.”
The end result will be the faster delivery of services beyond the current crisis and an increasingly competitive market landscape, Brandenburg said.
“Carriers in particular no longer feel bound to bundle network services with SIP trunking,” he added. “So more OTT offerings will come to compete with the existing OTT providers.”
We’ve compiled a list below, in alphabetical order, of 20 noteworthy SIP trunking market providers. It is based on feedback from analysts and experts, and recent news reports. The providers are making the most of the current competitive landscape and charting success.
8×8
Christianson cited 8×8 among providers that have come out with solutions specifically related to routing, configurations and integrations with Microsoft Teams.
“Competition is helping the consumer as partners have to adopt to attract and retain business,” she said. “Today you can find over 20-plus enterprise ready UCaaS providers offering a form of hosted VoIP. You now have many carriers not requiring purchasing a dedicated circuit to connect to their SIP/VoIP platforms and are allowing customers to access their voice backbone or PSTN by public IP connections. The partners needed to adjust to maintain business and have eased strict policies to allow customer access to their platforms.”
Bandwidth
Wholesale providers like Bandwidth now have their eyes on the enterprise customer, Brandenburg said. Last week, Bandwidth announced its partnership and participation in a North Carolina State University research study of robocalling campaigns. Bandwidth authorized the use of a SIP trunk and 66,606 phone numbers to the university to support the research.
CenturyLink
Christianson cited CenturyLink, with legacy Level 3 Communications SIP trunking, as a noteworthy provider.
“Despite the large push to quickly work from home because of COVID-19, enterprises are still adopting SIP in droves,” said Zach Renkert, channel sales enablement engineer at TBI. “In part, I believe this is largely due to the staying power of legacy PBXs that have been the work horses of these organizations for years and are starting to come to end of life.”
Cisco
Cisco was cited as a prominent provider by Andrew Bowser, sales engineer at Telarus.
“What we’re seeing is new offerings,” he said. “Take Cisco, for example. After making the Broadsoft acquisition that plunged them into cloud UC years ago, they recently launched a new offering called Cloud Connected PSTN (CCP). This offering is geared toward Cisco VARs who work with customers that still want to leverage their premise PBX and gives them the ability to extend that capability into the other Cisco Webex suite of services. Cisco is relying on few service provider vendors like Veracity and IntelePeer, to name a few, that will enable the PSTN functionality. This creates another revenue stream for our SIP trunking providers as the technology landscape continues to evolve.”
Evolve IP
Christianson cited Evolve IP among providers rolling out solutions specifically related to routing, configurations and integrations with Microsoft Teams.
An effective SIP trunking solution should offer the ability to failover to a public IP address, which in the past most carriers would not allow, she said.
“They would force customers to buy a dedicated circuit directly to their voice gateways,” Christianson said. “This new ability to be flexible is allowing customers to build redundancy and diversity and failover to an alternate provider.”
Granite Telecommunications
John Paullin, a senior cloud sales engineer at Avant, called Granite Telecommunications a noteworthy SIP trunking provider.
“Customers expect clear, but not necessarily hi-def, reliable audio with the ability to adjust to their needs in both low-and high-volume situations,” he said. “Lower rates for international calling are also becoming the norm as customers have alternative means of communicating abroad through applications like Microsoft Teams.”
IntelePeer
IntelePeer is “absolutely making a name for themselves” in the overall SIP market, Renkert said.
“They have long been a leader in their space and are expanding their capabilities greatly with the introduction of their Atmosphere CPaaS platform,” he said. “IntelePeer has made a name for themselves by being experts on a few specific products they offer. And this provides a level of engineering and customer support that the big players cannot hope to compete with.”
Inteliquent
Inteliquent is among the younger players giving older ones a run for their money, said Diane Myers, Omdia’s senior research director of VoIP, UC and IMS.
“When you’re coming from a fresher, new perspective and you’re not tied to all the legacy ways of doing business, you’re able to move faster and be more flexible,” she said. “And I think that’s what’s given some of these newer companies a little bit of an advantage. But I would also say tying the API. Embedding the ability to communicate through APIs into business applications is growing and it’s pretty powerful.”
Intrado
Paullin cited Intrado, which includes Flowroute, as a noteworthy provider. Earlier this month, Intrado announced it acquired OnSIP, a provider of UCaaS and collaboration solutions for SMB customers. With OnSIP, Intrado now has a fully-integrated product solution to serve all market segments with collaboration, calling, meetings, events, contact center and messaging tools along with support, professional services, self-service capabilities and a global reach.
Masergy
Paullin cited Masergy as a noteworthy provider. Masergy’s SIP trunking allows organizations to deploy VoIP services both on-premises and in the cloud.
An effective SIP trunking solution guarantees reliability, “not only at the customer’s edge, but in the core,” he said. Also crucial are the ability scale as call volume dictates, pricing flexibility (unlimited minutes per call path versus usage-based pricing), international reach and a mean opinion score (MOS) of at least 3.5, he said.
Momentum Telecom
Paullin cited Momentum Telecom as a noteworthy provider. Momentum provides integration and flexibility options, allowing businesses to grow and shrink as needed. Its SIP trunking services complement existing business phone systems, and features can be added as needed.
“Customers are pushing to have their communications services align with the business practices and workflows, not the other way around,” Brandenburg said. “Hybrid deployments, business continuity and high reliability are going on the top of most businesses’ list of needs, particularly as they have had to pivot to work from home (WFH), and consider returning to the office, or some combination in between.”
Nextiva
Nextiva is among prominent SIP trunking providers. It offers scaling and conversion from a traditional phone system. Companies can add SIP trunks into their existing PBX using Nextiva’s deployment feature in the cloud.
Earlier this month, Nextiva unveiled a new partner program, NeXus, along with new channel leaders from Microsoft, Dropbox and Google.
nexVortex (BCM One)
Paullin cited nexVortex as a noteworthy provider. BCM One acquired nexVortex in April. BCM One expanded and strengthened its SIP trunking platform and overall solutions portfolio with the acquisition.
NTT
Christianson cited NTT among providers that have launched solutions related to routing, configurations and integrations with Microsoft Teams.
“Demands are evolving, absolutely,” Renkert said. “Customers are expecting more from their providers when it comes to integrating and supporting more diverse platforms. They also expect greater use of the SIP technologies feature set that can be overlooked at times. Many organizations where uptime is critical to their business cannot rely on legacy technologies or put all their eggs in one basket with a cloud-based VoIP provider. Instead, they look to SIP trunking as a means for providing their organization with a redundant voice solution that provides encryption to ensure their proprietary information is secure.”
OneStream Networks
Paullin cited OneStream Networks as a noteworthy provider. In December, OneStream launched its Cisco Webex Calling, Meetings and Teams offering to provide customers with global PSTN telephony, cloud-based PBX voice services and Cisco Webex Meetings/Teams collaboration. OneStream provides voice, data and security services in more than 200 countries and 8,000 cities.
RingCentral
Christianson said RingCentral is among providers that have launched solutions specifically related to routing, configurations and integrations with Microsoft Teams.
“I think most SIP trunking providers and other voice providers are looking for ways to integrate with Microsoft Teams,” Bowser said. “We have seen some make the move to become certified with the approved Teams SBC providers, which will allow them to become a direct routing partner. We’ve also seen providers work on webhooks and bots that allow their voice solution to work within Teams.”
Sangoma
Sangoma/VoIP Innovations is among wholesale providers that now have their eyes on the enterprise customer, Brandenburg said.
“Another component of SIP that gives providers an opportunity to cement themselves in the market is the inherent disaster recovery and security capabilities that come with the technology,” Renkert said. “With redundant trunking technology, geo-routing [and encryption], organizations gain the benefit of more uptime and security of their solution, which is especially top of mind during the current climate.”
Twilio
Myers cited Twilio among younger players giving older players a run for their money.
“We’re seeing this big wave of businesses saying look, we need to embed voice and video, and some of these communication tools into applications that are different than me dialing a phone number,” she said. “I may want to click to call someone or escalate a call inside of a customer service portal. Or maybe I’m on my bank website and I see a big issue, so I need to get into their customer care. And all of that on the back end uses SIP. So the SIP trunking providers … like Twilio … have a lot of APIs and have those kinds of platforms. They’ve benefited from drawing SIP.”
Vonage
Vonage is among UCaaS providers that are luring in customers by being agile with CPaaS and Microsoft Teams Direct Routing services, Brandenburg said.
“Some communications platforms, like Vonage, can enable new features such as the ability to text a toll-free number and receive messages (such as promotion codes for retail) or as a customer service channel to a help desks using APIs,” Paullin said. “They can make phone numbers dance with countless applications.”
Voxbone
Voxbone is another wholesale provider that has its eye on the enterprise customer, Brandenburg said. And Myers said Voxbone is among the younger players giving older players a run for their money, benefiting from offering more communications flexibility.