ISDN / PSTN shutdowns in Australia & New Zealand: Guide

Communications in Australia and New Zealand are about to get a huge facelift. Telstra are currently in the midst of their huge ISDN decommissioning project in favour of IP communications based on the Australian government’s “Next Generation Broadband” (NBN) initiative, meanwhile, Spark in New Zealand are carrying out a similar migration away from the PSTN and toward what they call a “Converged Communications Network” (CCN) of IP-based telephony. Both of these phase-outs are scheduled to be completed on or by 2022, according to both Telstra and Spark. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the intricacies and regulatory minutiae of both of these processes, but the bottom line for businesses in Australia and New Zealand is this: you’re going to have to migrate your communications to a VoIP-based solution sooner rather than later.

This sounds like a scary ultimatum, but in reality, it’s a shining opportunity for managed IT service providers, UCaaS providers, and intelligent contact center software providers in Australia and New Zealand to gain market share from telco incumbents. All of these use-cases can benefit from a huge momentum away from traditional telephony and help more and more customers bring their communications infrastructure into the 21st century. But all of these solutions also need to be built on top of telephony services that match or beat the existing networks. At Telnyx, we’re committed to helping communications solutions providers serve their customers by offering enterprise-grade voice and communications services like SIP Trunking that match or beat the PSTN and ISDN on quality, price, and configurability.

Future-proofing your voice communications with SIP trunking

Although not all networks are created equal, SIP trunking communications all leverage IP networks to carry your communications traffic, without relying on the traditional ISDN or PSTN. Given that SIP trunking ticks all the boxes for avoiding the pain of legacy telcos shutting down their old networks, why should you care about your selection of SIP trunking partner? Well, it turns out that there’s a bit more to enterprise-grade communications over SIP trunking than just ticking a box.

Quality is King

First, do no harm. SIP trunking should never, ever be a downgrade in quality from traditional telephony. Ever. Unfortunately, that’s the case with many SIP trunking providers, as sub-par network performance, out-dated media codecs, and patchy routing introduce latency and audio issues to your calls.

Look for a voice provider that offers true PSTN and ISDN replacement services, with enterprise-grade voice quality. At Telnyx, we believe so strongly in quality that we built our own global, private IP network, designed from the ground up to handle real-time communications flawlessly. We have points of presence all over the world (including one in Sydney) interconnected by a private fibre backbone, so your traffic avoids the unreliable public internet.

Don’t miss out on the perks of tech-enabled comms

Moving your communications to the cloud doesn’t just put you ahead of the technology curve - it opens up a whole new world of possibilities for monitoring, configuring, and gaining insights from your communications in real-time. The right SIP trunking provider will enable a range of new capabilities, like segmenting your traffic into groups for easy billing and invoicing, and automatically scaling your capacity to deal with surges in demand.

You should seek out a provider who puts all of your communications data and configuration options at your fingertips, so that you can get even more value from your SIP trunking solution. That’s why we built our Mission Control Portal. This intuitive user interface lets you control just about every aspect of your voice communications through one pane of glass, without ever needing to speak to an account agent.

Choose a partner for your future, not a band-aid for your problems

You’re switching to SIP trunking now so that you can avoid the pain of migrating with a legacy telco provider in the future. Keep that future-proofing intention in mind as you pick your SIP trunking provider, and choose a partner that will accelerate your growth instead of limiting it.

If your business doesn’t need global communications now, there’s a good chance that it will before the huge network migrations in Australia and New Zealand are finished. Telnyx is a global provider with true local presence - our aforementioned network (we’re really quite proud of it) has points of presence all over the globe, meaning you get the same great call quality and low rates no matter where you’re calling.

It’s also important to think about how your business communications will evolve over time when choosing a SIP trunking provider. The more tech-forward providers will offer APIs that let you configure everything about your communications programmatically, unlocking huge time savings when it comes to building out your communications infrastructure. Here at Telnyx, we just launched a shiny new API that leads the pack for ease of use and performance, so you can build intelligent communications that’ll boost your business as it scales.

Don’t fall foul of red tape

If you’re switching from an established telco provider to a SIP trunking carrier in the cloud, it’s understandable to be worried about that carrier’s ability to navigate complex telecommunications laws and regulations. Indeed, a lot of SIP trunking providers step back from any regulatory complexity, relying on the traditional telcos to provide them with phone numbers, routing, and other telephony assets. This seems like a sound approach at first, but it really just splits simple problems between multiple different businesses, and the end result is a worse experience for customers - sub-optimal routing, limited number availability, and drawn-out, mistake-ridden number ports.

If you don’t want regulatory headaches to be a part of your migration, make sure your SIP trunking provider is also a licensed carrier in your locality, or at the very least, has deep regulatory know-how. Telnyx is a licensed carrier in Australia, giving us full access to local telephony assets and allowing us to offer a deep inventory of local, mobile, and toll-free phone numbers, as well as a smooth and transparent number porting process. Pair this with our full control over call routing, and our dedicated network PoP in Sydney, and you get a plug-and-play ISDN replacement solution with no worries.

How to make the switch to SIP trunking

Plug and play with Bring Your Own Carrier

Even outside of mandatory telco migrations, huge swathes of customers make the jump from traditional business telephony systems to SIP trunking because of the flexibility and ease of setup it offers. Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) is a shining example of this in action. The chances are, your business is already running some sort of communications system - BYOC enables you to easily swap in Telnyx as the underlying carrier for that system with just a few clicks.

If you’re ahead of the curve and already run communications through a voice API platform like Twilio or Plivo, you can swap out their expensive and restrictive platforms for a flexible SIP trunking carrier that owns its infrastructure all over the world. Our simple guides show you how to make tiny changes to your voice application code from both of these platforms, sending calls via the Telnyx network so you save money instantly.

Integrate more deeply and save even more

If you’d prefer to future-proof your communications even further, our sales team are ready and waiting to hear from you. Customers who choose to build intelligent voice API functionality on Telnyx Call Control can enjoy our ultra-low response times, real-time command processing and flexible API structure to build better, faster, and more reliable voice applications. On top of the SIP trunking cost savings, our Call Control pricing also beats the competitors soundly, starting at $0.002/min to add voice API capabilities to any call.