SIP Trunking: How Are The Carriers Doing?SIP Trunking: How Are The Carriers Doing?

At Interop New York next week, service provider expert Lisa Pierce will offer her judgments of the progress of SIP trunking offers. Here's a preview of her findings.

Lisa Pierce of Strategic Networks Group is the most knowledgeable analyst covering the carriers' business service offerings, and for the past couple of years, she's been making a close study of SIP trunking. We've been fortunate enough to have Lisa on the program at VoiceCon the past couple of years, and she'll be back again at Enterprise Connect. She'll also be presenting a session on SIP Trunking at Interop New York next week, and I got a sneak peek at her slides, which offered some encouragement about prospects for SIP Trunking.

Lisa offers this chart showing some key metrics around SIP trunking, and her evaluation of where the carriers are according to these metrics (blue bar); and where she expects they'll be by the end of 2012 (gold bar).

Frankly, I was surprised that Lisa scored the carriers so high on availability, because we still hear complaints from our audience that they can't get SIP trunks everywhere they want them. But there are certainly other issues, which Lisa has called out in the past, that she continues to rate low--such as SLAs, pricing, and implementation follow-up.

The good news is that Lisa is expecting to see significant improvement in all of these areas over the next 15 months. Of course, 15 months could wind up seeming like a long time to a marketplace that's already expressing frustration about SIP trunk services. And note particularly that SLAs--not a small consideration for an enterprise that's considering placing mission-critical traffic on a SIP trunk--are expected to remain below the average point even a year and a quarter from now.

Lisa will expand on the judgments represented in this slide when she gives her talk in New York on Friday of next week. If you're in the area, I recommend you stop in and hear what she has to say.