Forum Discussion
Direct Routing
Not sure what the concern is over number portability? As the numbers will be hosted by the sip trunk provider either way?
We've done quite a few deployments, particularly universities in the UK where they needed to retain legacy analogue equipment or sip endpoints. All done successfully.
We haven't done many deployments which required third party integrations i.e. call centre (if customer requires call centre solution we have partnered with Mida and deploy their solution) but I'm not sure why this would be solved by an organisation using their own on prem or vSBC? If it can be done using their own SBC it can also be done carrier hosted.
Interesting to hear. I suspect that there may not be enough talk or details being provided that might lead to confusion over what is capable. I agree that if you provide SIP, anything you can probably do on-premises can be done with a service provider as well.
A couple I've seen previously only did SIP to specific providers, which would be Teams/Skype, but that'd be it, so you could not get the integrations you'd possibly need for third parties.
I guess the number portability thing comes up because the few folks that I've seen that offer hosted PBX services are not usually the carriers, such as AT&T, BT, etc, so there is hesitation on porting the numbers to somebody else. It becomes an issue between "I'm paying my carrier and they're my numbers" to "I'm paying vendor A, to whom I transferred my numbers, and now they own them under their contract". Granted, most situations like that probably have clauses that say the numbers are still yours, but folks get antsy about losing that control.
Other caveats could be directory lookups for call routing decisions, for example user exists in AD with phone number, then route to MS Teams, otherwise route to old PBX. I'm sure there are ways around that such as VPN, or LDAP servers with firewall restrictions.
It might also be regional, you mentioned UK so the offerings might be different compared to the US where I've been dealing with folks. It would be a curious survey, calling plan vs direct routing vs 3rd party direct routing, and broken down by countries.
Cheers