One Trunk, Five Seats

Finding the best option for customers while also saving them money is important in customer relations and keeping customers happy. A smaller/midsize business with about 30 employees may have a SIP Trunking service to their IP or TDM-based PBX. A great way to save a customer money is to remember that it is not necessary to have one trunk for every seat. In most cases, businesses can have about five seats for every trunk. When you combine SIP Trunking on a T-1 with the customer’s Internet access on a single Converged connection, you can often eliminate a voice T-1 into a business and save the customer even more monthly cost.

So if we apply this rule, a company that has 40 employees would only need eight trunks, which could occupy as little as 400K of a 1.5Mb T-1, leaving plenty of bandwidth for Internet access on the same Converged loop. If this company were to buy a trunk for every seat it would cost about $600.00 monthly. Eight trunks would only cost about $160.00 monthly, plus $300-500 MRC saved when the Voice T-1 is eliminated. This can save the customer a significant amount of money on a monthly basis.

You can see the difference.

Unfortunately, we cannot apply this rule to call centers or call center departments because phone usage is too high for one trunk to accommodate five seats.