Comcast Business (NASDAQ: CMCSA) is taking a long pass with its SIP trunking service, announcing that the service is available across its entire service area, covering 39 states and 20 major U.S. markets.
By offering SIP trunking, Comcast Business can address a wider group of customers, ranging from small to medium businesses (SMB), medium-sized businesses and even large enterprises.
Given the diversity of these customer groups, being able to provide a mix of IP-based products and even TDM-based products like PRI trunks combined with its growing fiber-based Ethernet footprint throughout the United States means that Comcast Business can more effectively address a wider range of business customers that are at various stages of migration with their premises voice networks.
"We concluded the national roll out for our SIP trunking product," said Caitlin Clark-Zigmond, senior director, product management – advanced voice at Comcast Business, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "We have 16 regions and three divisions and started the roll out across the sales force and completed that task and once we get to a national footprint we roll out to our national account teams and also our indirect partners, which are master agents."
A big selling point of Comcast Business' SIP trunking service is flexibility.
Customers can purchase up to 800 concurrent call sessions, up initially from only 250 sessions. It is offered in both in a single site or distributed satellite locations where the PBX is homed in one of Comcast Business' footprint locations.
"We're doing a SIP trunking solution that originally was originally 250 and we upped that to 800 concurrent call sessions," Clark-Zigmond said. "You buy the solution at a minimum of 6 concurrent call increments and pricing is discounted on volume and term."
Interest from businesses in SIP trunking continues to ramp. A new report by OneVoice revealed that 65 percent of businesses are currently using SIP, and the number of SIP trunking users is expected to grow more than five times by 2017.
Offering SIP trunking is a logical progression for Comcast Business.
It serves as a complement to its suite of cloud-based hosted PBX, PRI trunks and Business Voice offerings for SMBs and large businesses. With the Business VoiceEdge product it launched in 2012, a business customer does not have to purchase a PBX or key system to manage their voice calls, while PRI trunks allow customers to use their existing analog PBX and scale up as needed.
"SIP trunking complements the portfolio in that we have had PRI trunking for quite some time and we have black phone replacement or simple business voice and we have our hosted PBX solution," Clark-Zigmond said. "When we look at larger enterprises, we see the opportunity to offer both SIP and hosted and allowing them to have hybrid solutions."
For more:
- see the release
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This article was updated on March 19 with additoinal information from Comcast Business.