NewsUC&C17 Jan 2017 · 2 min read

Three quarters of SIP Trunk installations face problems

According to The SIP School’s SIP Survey 2016, end users are still finding SIP installations complex and problematic.

End users are still finding SIP installations complex and problematic, with a new survey suggesting that three quarters face issues in set up.

The SIP School’s SIP Survey 2016. gauged the opinions of 926 UC vendors, installers and their clients. According to its findings, just 22 per cent of businesses report never having problems with SIP migrations.

Although that represents a 5 per cent increase on the figures from the previous year, it suggests SIP trunk installations remain challenging to most users.

With SIP still representing the best available protocol for processing multimedia communications, addressing this is key challenge for the UC industry going forward.

Complexity

A third of respondents reported problems relating directly to their SIP trunk providers. However, just under a quarter (23.5 per cent) also had issues with their Edge/SBC devices. 17 per cent faced problems with PBX configuration.

This underlines part of the challenge facing SIP trunk installation. The process is fragmented between several different parties, namely the SIP trunk provider, the SBC vendor and the PBX vendor. This multiplies the potential for errors and glitches, because how these different points integrate is crucial to the smooth running of the entire system.

Documentation

The survey’s breakdown of the causes of problems reported with service providers, SBC and PBX vendors reveals some telling patterns. Many issues consistently arise from a lack of effective configuration.

Of the problems reported with SIP Trunk providers, the most common were audio only working one way (45 per cent), followed by Codec mismatch and poor quality (both 30 percent). This was mirrored by the survey results for SBC / Edge devices. 50 per cent of reported problems involved one way audio, and 36 per cent Codec issues. A further 38 per cent were down to SIP registration failures.

For PBX problems, more than half (57 per cent) of problems were attributed to manual configuration.

As the survey’s authors point out, all of these issues are avoidable with better communication between parties:

If the ITSP supplies the client with all the settings it needs for successful service installation/setup then these settings can be put into the PBX/SBC configuration forms to ensure successful setup.

They call for improvements in standard documentation to avoid problems with configuration. Correct communication of technical specifications would, they claim, avoid common errors such as one way audio.

However, they also acknowledge that good documentation is only effective if different parties use it accurately. Ultimately, the authors suggest, making SIP installation more efficient may depend on providers offering virtual SBC and PBX via the cloud. This would allow them to control all aspects of installation themselves.

How are your SIP installs? Have your say.. comment below.

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