Telecommunications organizations seek cost savings to remain competitive in the marketplace. Telecommunications cost is one of the areas that can be trimmed. Enterprises looking to save costs can do so by migrating from traditional TDM to SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) based communications, taking advantage of convergence of voice and data over a single IP network. Companies can leverage IP networks for enhancing relationships with partners and customers making it easy to transact business using newer technologies that make possible services like federation of enterprise instant messaging, SIP directory services, and site-to-site multimedia applications.
Convergence is also happening inside service provider networks to cater to the productivity and cost reduction demands of enterprise customers. They are leveraging their investments already made in IP backbone networks to provide transport of real-time multimedia applications to enterprises moving to IP Telephony. Many traditional providers with established enterprise MPLS networks as well as pure IP network-centric service providers are offering SIP based trunks similar in functionality to a traditional PBX trunk.
As enterprises implement advanced services like Unified Communications, networks have to transport a variety of media and non-media data formats to realize connectivity demands of enterprises. SIP, an IETF standard, has been designed to handle multimedia sessions. SIP technology at the enterprise edge and within the core telecom network allows organizations to offer rich communications not possible with traditional PSTN.
Most enterprises still own TDM PBXs with disjointed islands of networks connected by different TDM interfaces. Customers who are interested in migrating to Unified Communications technology need to upgrade their existing infrastructure to IP based switches. But such a move requires massive capital expenses. A better and proven alternative is to connect disparate TDM networks with an edge demarcation device. A media gateway acting as a demarcation device helps organizations leapfrog a complete generation of IP-PBXs and through mediation of TDM to IP, organizations can avoid having to forklift or rip and replace existing networks.