The Benefits of SIP Trunking for Schools
There are a number of compelling reasons that SIP trunking is so popular in education.
Costs Savings
SIP trunking lowers costs for schools in several ways. You can say goodbye to expensive physical telephone lines (PRI) that often come with expensive, long-term contracts. With most SIP service providers, long-distance calls to the lower 48 US states are included with the low monthly per channel fee. Private school finance administrators appreciate the predictability of this approach. PRI lines are sold in groups of 26, many schools don’t need that many lines, so they end up paying more than is necessary. SIP can be sold one channel (equivalent to a line) at a time, so you aren’t wasting money on unused lines.
These factors combined mean that many schools see telecommunications savings of as much as 50%.<br>
Benefits of SIP
Increased Flexibility
With SIP trunking you can easily add or remove channels as your needs change. With the SIP.US service, you can make changes on demand and cancel any time. You don’t have to predict your future communications needs.
Streamlined Network Management
IT resources are scarce and expensive for most schools. The traditional approach to telecommunications requires two networks, one for the phones and one for the internet. SIP, on the other hand, allows you to use a single network for both purposes, reducing the strain on precious technical resources.
Portable Direct Inward Dialing
With SIP, you can provision separate 10-digit phone numbers for different employees or rooms. This increases the flexibility of the call flow for your office or offices. But what’s better is that you can move one number from one room to the next so teachers can get their calls from wherever they happen to be working. If you already have DID numbers or others that you’d like to keep, they can be ported to your new SIP trunks.
Potential E-Rate Discounts
The FCC’s E-Rate (Education Rate) program makes telecommunications and information services more affordable for schools and libraries. With funding from the Universal Service Fund, E-rate provides discounts for telecommunications, Internet access and internal connections to eligible schools and libraries.
In order to be eligible to receive E-Rate discounts, schools and libraries must meet certain eligibility criteria. In general, elementary schools, secondary schools, private schools, and religious schools are eligible to receive discounts, as long as they have an endowment less than $50 million and are not for profit. You can learn more and apply on the FCC’s website.
Why SIP.US is the Perfect Fit for Schools
As you can see, there are a lot of advantages of SIP trunking for schools. Not all SIP trunking services are the same, so you will need to look at the features, fees, and support offered by every vendor you consider. SIP.US is an ideal fit for schools because we make it painless.
Simple and transparent pricing
We want you to know what to expect when planning your budget, so we are upfront about every fee we might possibly charge. We charge a low monthly fee for each SIP channel without setup fees. We also offer low rates for local and toll-free direct dial numbers. All of the cost details can be found right here.
Powerful, but user-friendly control panel
Our administrative interface is intuitive and easy to use even for non-technical folks. This puts you in control allowing you to make moves adds and changes, as well as to review call data records to track the communications habits of your school. If you run into something that's more complicated, we are always available to help.
Works with most phone systems
Our trunks can be used with almost any internet-enabled system, whether it is at the school or hosted by a third party. We also work with the many free, open-source PBX systems on the market. If your phone system isn't internet ready (if it's less than 10 years old, it probably is), we still may be able to help.
Easy to scale
With SIP.US you get and pay for exactly the number of SIP trunk channels you need at the moment. If you want to add more or cancel a some, you can do it on-demand anytime you like. There are no contracts.
Easy to try out
Not sure that your internet network will support SIP or have other concerns about the service? You've come to the right place. We offer 60 minutes of free calling for you to try out our solution. It is easy to set up in just a few minutes, so there's nothing in your way from putting us through the test.
Easy to Trust
SIP.US utilizes only Tier-1 upstream providers to route our SIP traffic. We do this to ensure that you get the highest quality voice experience and a redundant network for outstanding reliability and performance.