What is A VoIP Gateway?

A VoIP gateway is utilized to a bridge in between the worlds of legacy telephony and the VoIP. Gateways are normally utilized to connect tradition phone systems (PBXs or ACDs) with VoIP resources, or to link contemporary VoIP phone systems with legacy phone lines.

Adding VoIP to a legacy PBX system is a fantastic way to include features and lower costs. The gateway links to the legacy system through either analog or digital trunk ports. The PBX sees the entrance as either the telephone company or as another networked PBX. Calls from the PBX to the outside world are transformed into VoIP calls and sent online to a VoIP provider or other VoIP peers. Calls coming from VoIP sources are transformed into the proper tradition protocol and provided to the PBX.

Using a gateway to connect a VoIP phone system to standard phone lines makes good sense in circumstances where SIP trunks are not offered or where your application needs the reliability of the PSTN. It also makes it easy to construct redundant systems. The gateway usually communicates with a primary IP PBX. In case of a failure on the primary, the gateway can interact with a backup system.

Other uses for VoIP gateways consist of staged migrations, where the gateway serves as a bridge between the PSTN, a legacy PBX and a brand-new IP PBX. In this case, the PSTN trunks are connected to one interface on the entrance. Another user interface links to the trunk port on the tradition PBX. The new IP PBX is integrated over a VoIP protocol (generally SIP). The gateway directs some inbound calls to the tradition PBX and others to the IP PBX. It likewise passes calls between the two PBXs. This permits some department or other neighborhoods of the business to stay on the legacy system while others move to the IP system.

Key Facts & Features

Gateways come in several formats. Analog entrances convert between VoIP procedures and standard analog phone lines and/or phones. Digital entrances transform between VoIP and numerous type of digital phone services: T1, E1, PRI and/or BRI, depending upon the gateway.

Gateways can normally connect to several VoIP endpoints (devices or services), which permits PSTN resources to be shared between numerous IP communications systems.

The routing functions constructed into an entrance permit it to intelligently adjust calls from one medium to another. For example, they can include or eliminate digits in the dial string when passing a call. They can likewise acknowledge different patterns and route them across various user interfaces.

Gateways can be utilized to transform VoIP calls from one code to another, a process known as transcoding. This can be beneficial when bridging several VoIP solutions together. VoIP calls online do need a solid Internet connection. Run a VoIP network test as a basic diagnostic tool to identify the jitter, bandwidth, and latency on the Internet connection.

Key Benefits

Gateways can extend the life of legacy equipment by "VoIP enabling" it. This can include changing conventional trunk lines with SIP trunks or routing some subset of traffic over VoIP to a remote PBX or gateway - a process referred to as toll bypass.

Gateways allow versatility. Rather than moving from a traditional PBX to an IP PBX in one step, a business can stage the migration using the entrance as a bridge in between the two systems.