Customers Say: 8x8 Towers Above SIP Trunking CompetitorsCustomers Say: 8x8 Towers Above SIP Trunking Competitors
Eastern Management Group satisfaction study finds 8x8 may be the best wholesale SIP trunking supplier.
November 20, 2020
With its yearly revenue growing 27% and now approaching a half-billion dollars, 8x8 is far from the hosted PBX company it launched as 23 years ago. Today its product portfolio includes UCaaS, CCaaS (new bookings are up 62%), CPaaS, and SIP trunking — the latter introduced 10 years ago for the small, mid-market, and enterprise retail customers, and carrier (wholesale) customers.
Why SIP Trunking
Eastern Management Group research shows 80% of small, mid-market, and enterprise businesses use SIP trunking. Nearly 100% have SIP capability on the most recent new phone purchased. By 2027, 96% of all network traffic will be SIP. SIP trunking is more than big; it's the front door to 8x8's entire business.
SIP trunking is a $17 billion industry growing more than 7% annually. That's considerably faster growth than overall IT spending.
The explosive growth of SIP trunking is principally due to:
Incumbent carriers turning off the PSTN worldwide
SIP trunking rock-bottom prices
Remote work (e.g., work-from-home)
Due to COVID-19, accelerated adoption of cloud applications for enterprise productivity and process improvement, including mobile, messaging, video, and e-commerce]
UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, growth
In recent years, increasing competition has resulted in better quality SIP trunks as well as improvements in network engineering, network operations, traffic management, redundancy, security, and pricing. 8x8 is one example of a SIP provider rising to the competitive challenge.
8x8 has an expansive SIP trunking network. Its value proposition sets 8x8 apart from competitors in many respects:
Global infrastructure — 16 data centers globally using technology based on more than 240 patents guarantees call quality; all the media is local.
Full PSTN replacement in 40+ countries
Local and toll-free phone numbers in 90+ and 109 countries, respectively
Tier 1 redundant network — Provides a direct connection to the internet backbone
Redundant carriers — Guarantees reliability and minimizes costly downtime by rerouting services or forwarding calls to mobile phones in the event of an interruption
Call flow — Kept within the region
Call quality — Avoids call quality issues like jitter and delay with guaranteed less than 1% packet loss and a latency standard of 150 milliseconds or less
Ease of connectivity — Simple physical infrastructure allows users to be added quickly
Scalability
Leverage — Can tap its network of underlying carriers for buying advantage; lower prices may be passed to SIP trunking customers
Emergency services
Unbundled — Enterprises can buy SIP trunking separately from 8x8’s cloud services 8x8 unbundles SIP trunking from the company's other cloud services
Customer retention — Churn is low
Nice-to-Haves
8x8 provides SIP trunking features that make customers sticky:
VoIP call performance monitoring and troubleshooting
Performance review baselines
VoIP and network dashboards
VoIP gateway and performance alerts
Performance reports
Trunk monitoring
8x8 Wholesale Customers
8x8's SIP trunking wholesale customers are often small carriers looking for high quality. Each may be handling millions or hundreds of millions of minutes of toll-free, termination, and 8YY (outbound toll-free) monthly.
When converting to 8x8 SIP trunking, wholesale customers are generally replacing one or more existing suppliers. Alternatively, 8x8 SIP trunking may operate in parallel rather than changing-out a supplier. 8x8 often offers services that others cannot.
What Customers Think of 8x8 SIP Trunking
In Eastern Management Group's 2020 SIP trunking customer satisfaction survey of 29 SIP trunk providers, 8x8 towers above the competition in key customer satisfaction measurements (see related No Jitter post). 8x8 is ranked #1 for support and #1 for Recommend-To-A-Friend — the survey capstone measure. 8x8 earned two additional four-star ratings (out of a possible four) for technology and product, and purchase experience. 8x8 is #3 in the world in our customer satisfaction Top-10-Leaders.
Final Thoughts
SIP trunking is now and will remain an important service. All providers have retail offers, and some, like 8x8, sell wholesale. 8x8 SIP trunking is an asset possibly without peer. Eastern Management Group's survey of thousands of SIP trunking customers suggests this is likely the case.
The research used in this article comes from the following Eastern Management Group sources: "2020-2027 SIP Market 7-Year Forecast and Analysis," "Carrier Grade SIP Trunking," "2019 SIP Trunking Customer Satisfaction Report," and "Omnibus Surveys 2020-2021" For more information on these studies and reports, please contact John Malone directly at [email protected] or 212-738-9402 Ext. 2201.
