Where is UC Going in the Future with SIP?

Don't know if this is the right sub-forum for this or not. As I read UC blogs I see a lot of changes coming to telephony especially dealing with SIP federations. Lync 2013 will be federating? with Skype allowing you to integrate all your Skype contacts in Office 2013. I see FCC pushing for the end of PSTN completely by 2018. I don't know how well that would work in terms of reliability for things like 911 and alarm systems. How popular will this UCaaS thing get with Cisco HCS and Office 365? Is it just for SMBs or will this work in enterprise. I find all this stuff very cool and just curious to know what others think about it.

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shodown

Depends on the company. I see a mixture of both. I see some companies can move to the cloud and others can't. I've been in a long discussion on linkedin recently about this same matter. The problem with cloud UC is the cost. When we talked with AT&T about cloud voip 6 months of the service would pay for 2 UC clusters, licencing, and my consultant salary. The network manager laughed them off the phone. For smaller companies without the internal staff I see this working more to there favor.

For PSTN. I still see quite a few PRI's going in. Many of them are back-hauled IP to a gateway somewhere. So I do see most service providers delivering a IAD type device and giving PSTN connections to those who need them, and everyone else using some form of SIP. There are still quite a few kinks to work out and the pricing needs some adjustment as well. If you buy a 5 meg SIP trunk you should be able to place 5 megs of calls across it, not some number of active channels like the carriers want you to have.

DexterPark

skinsFan202 wrote: »

I don't know how well that would work in terms of reliability for things like 911 and alarm systems.

Well think of it this way, in the 80's when they began moving from old Analog technology to PRI (Digital/TDM) they didn't worry about reliability of the technology so much as reliability of the carrier because thats really what reliability comes down to. SIP (IP-based) is the same way, if you are having reliability issues then get another provider. Hope this shows another way of looking at it.

sieff

I definitely think SIP is the future. Providers have improved on interoperability. I've been deploying SIP for a couple of enterprises already and the cost factor is the main driving force. The savings on long distance and monthly recurring cost compared to PRI's give immediate returns. I'm only now researching UCaaS and HCS, from what I can tell vendors have some padded profits in with the monthly service fees. I totally see it as being ideal for enterprises that don't want to deal with install cost, license renewals and consulting services for maint and upgrades. I do see a huge case for Contact Centers on HCS as well. I'm curious to know what the monthly costs are ... I believe its calculated per endpoint.

shodown

hosted contact centers are very exepensive. I see them working for things like election cycles, massive product recalls. and fundrasing events where the purchase of them would be too high and only used for a short amount of time. I remember back in 2008/9 it costing close to 200 a month per contact center seat.

sieff

$200 per seat is pretty expensive. so if i understand correctly a Cisco Partner will resale HCS ... and also do the UC application configurations. and Cisco on the backend manages the UCS hardware and gear that this is all hosted on. am I right with this summary here?