Dave Smith, SVP of Marketing for Swyx, comments “The major benefit of ‘Business Class’ SIP Trunking is that, for the SME business in particular, it will bring both cost-savings in terms of call charges and PBX equipment purchase. In addition, it will allow the SME business a greater flexibility in terms of how it operates its telephony service. For example, SIP providers can offer flexible PSTN number ranges to businesses that are now non-geographic dependent, such as local-rate numbers, and this can help to promote the attractiveness of a business to the market.”
He continued, “Equally important is that SIP trunking also enables ITSPs and IP/Ethernet Service providers, as well as channel resellers, to offer a range of telephony services to the market on the current IP infrastructure beyond that of pure connectivity – for example offering managed voice services, customised applications, number ranging services (eg local access services) and flexible tariff schemes to the business community”.
Smith further notes that “many industry observers predict that SIP will be to VoIP what HTTP has been to the Internet, which is why Swyx has exercised first-mover advantage in the market with a series of SIP developments during 2005. SIP gives the end customer the ability to choose – from SIP handsets on the user side, a choice of service providers on the networking side and an open communications & multimedia infrastructure on the application side. There is no doubt that the ability to support SIP now and in the future will be crucial."
In addition to SIP trunking and a number of user-feature enhancements Version 5.0 also includes G.729a compression and the support of ENUM (Telephone Number Mapping), a specification to translate telephone numbers to domain names and to define the type of communication (Email, SIP, Instant Messaging, etc.).
A new range of Swyx IP telephones has also been introduced to accompany this release. Firstly the highly-popular 400 series and USB range of telephones will now be available in black to offer the end user more colour choice. In addition, Swyx has announced the availability of a new range of LCD Self-labelling Key (SLK) IP phones, which will be supported with the release of Version 5.0 of SwyxWare.
SwyxWare Version 5.0 will be available from September 2005.