Disruptive Telephony

Yesterday, Bandwidth.com announced that their SIP trunking service would be powering Mitel solution centers across the US.  From the news release:

Bandwidth.com, a leading nationwide provider of complete business communications solutions, today announced that it will be powering all Mitel(R) Solution Centers across the country enabling customers and VARS to preview innovative solutions, including SIP Trunking technology in a live environment. Mitel operates solution centers in five locations; Chicago, Costa Mesa, Atlanta, New York and Herndon (Virginia), all of which will be equipped with Bandwidth.com's SIP Trunking VoIP solution by the end of June.

There's been a relationship between Bandwidth.com and Mitel since last September. This announcement yesterday is a logical evolution of that relationship.

There's a lot to write about the incredibly disruptive power of SIP trunking... I don't think we yet fully understand how the power to obtain SIP trunks from anywhere in the world is going to so severely disrupt the global telecommunications infrastructure.  With IP, geography no longer matters... and there are all sorts of local carriers - and tax authorities! - who I don't think fully understand how much this messes up their business models.  I really need to write that up........

Two notes for Bandwidth.com:

1. On the positive side, they have to get credit for one of the coolest graphics I've yet seen for SIP trunking!  I'm talking about the image above that is also on their bandwidth.com/mitel page.  I'm going to have to see about getting permission to use that graphic in some presentations... I just really like it from the design side!

2. On the less positive side, it continues to astound me the number of companies that do not immediately post their news releases on their web site "news" area!  This news release went out yesterday (June 11) but yet it's still not on Bandwidth.com's news page!  It's too bad, because they are missing out on a good potential for inbound links to their site.  Instead, we're left to link to either TMCNet or PR Newswire, both of whom I'm sure don't mind the traffic.  Our (Mitel) PR team have moved to getting the news releases posted on the site right away... I don't know the stats on what kind of traffic we get, but I do know that it lets bloggers like me link directly to the site if we want to.

(See also Ken Camp's commentary about the rising importance of SIP trunking in SMB.)