Sprint (
News -
Alert) now is reportedly selling SIP trunking service on a "general availability" basis, allowing business users to buy a single IP connection for voice, data and video communications while reducing local, long-distance and calling feature expenses.
The company was one of the first U.S.-based providers of SIP trunking services qualified for use with Office Communications Server 2007 R2, and has been selling the service since early 2009 on a limited basis.
SIP trunking eliminates the use of primary rate interface (T1) local trunks and allows businesses to share capacity over one IP connection for multiple locations and applications.
Sprint SIP trunking is available through the company's newly formed Business Markets Group. Composed of more than 4,000 sales, support, marketing and operations personnel, BMG is solely dedicated to enterprise, general business and public sector customers.
BMG delivers wireless, wireline and converged solutions for companies. AT&T (
News -
Alert) has been selling SIP trunks since 2007 and Verizon Business has been selling SIP trunking service since early 2006. So have several independent providers, such as Global Crossing, Broadvox (
News -
Alert), Bandwidth.com and others.
In fact, SIP trunking is becoming a standard wide area network service. That has implications for future development of the market. The general pattern in the communications market, at least where capacity services are concerned, is for leading-edge services to be pioneered first by specialists.
As volume grows, and the revenue target becomes larger, what typically happens is that the largest providers get more aggressive about sales, and market share starts to shift towards larger incumbents, and away from upstarts.
That doesn't mean niches do not exist: they always do. But sheer volume tends to shift as products become mainstream and as larger incumbents who have been slow to "push" services that cannibalize existing revenues conclude they no longer can afford to "manage" sales of new products compared to legacy products.
One has to expect that in the SIP trunking category, as well.
Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Amy Tierney
