What Services Does an SIP Provider Offer?

by Andrew Wiggin⁽¹³⁾
http://www.onsip.com

VoIP has many components and the service as a whole depends on the weakest link the chain. If for example your Internet connection isn't up to the mark, it doesn't matter how good your VoIP provider is or how much you pay for the service - call quality is still going to suck. But there are many links which are provided by third parties and in this article, we look at what we need to use VoIP and how it's important to ensure that you choose the best possible SIP provider. Without thorough research into which provider suits your needs best, you'll find VoIP to be a very frustrating experience. Of course, there are providers who offer all the various services in one bundle. Businesses usually prefer this type of system since management is easier.

Providing a Telephone Number

To use VoIP in a meaningful way, you have to allow your other people to reach you on a specific telephone number. Mind you, this is very different from using a specific device. VoIP allows many devices to have the same telephone number through a feature known as SIP forking. Though it's possible for two SIP enabled clients to communicate with each other entirely over the Internet, most people are going to communicate via a traditional telephone service. And the first thing you need your SIP provider to give you is a telephone number.

There aren't many services giving out telephone numbers for free. Most of them are paid. The few organizations that do give out free numbers have seen very heavy traffic and have had to close down temporarily. Gizmo5 was bought up by Google. Another provider called SIPGate ran out of telephone numbers a few months ago and is now closed to new registrations.

One service called IPKall is up and running. But probably the only reason it's still working is that they reclaim telephone numbers not used within 30 days. Google Voice of course isn't a true VoIP service but they do provide you with a free telephone number of your own.

An SIP Service

The second service is the ability to receive calls to your SIP address and pipe them to an SIP client of your choice. This requires reliable servers and good uptime as well as being close to your ultimate location to reduce lag and round trip time. Think of it as an email service provider for voice instead of text.

These two types of services together create the VoIP experience. Professional VoIP providers bundle them together to provide a single seamless experience for your business or home.

Andrew Wiggin is an expert consultant on Mobile Business VoIP Systems. He also specializes in Levels of Mobile VoIP Service.

Article submitted Wednesday, November 16, 2011 & read 7 times.

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