The Trouble with Reviews of SIP Trunking Providers

Let me start by saying that the trouble with reviews of SIP trunking providers isn’t that ours are bad.  In fact, we couldn’t find a single bad review of SIP.US and we really tried. (We did find some good ones.) No, the trouble is that it is difficult to find useful reviews of SIP trunking providers at all. Some review sites are confusing and others are advertising disguised as reviews.  Here’s why it is so hard to get good information on SIP vendors.

There Just Aren’t a Lot of Reviews Out There

When we wrote about this subject a few months ago, I predicted that our blog about SIP trunk reviews would, “probably rank well on Google for “SIP Vendor Reviews.” Well, guess what?  It is number 3. This isn’t a testament to my great writing, just a sign that not a lot of people are writing SIP vendor reviews.  Hopefully this will change as the growing popularity of SIP trunking generates more interest in the press and business community.

A Lot of People Don’t Understand the Difference between SIP and Hosted VoIP

Many of the sites that claim to have reviews of SIP trunking providers, actually have reviews of hosted VoIP companies that don’t even provide SIP as a standalone service. This one from Software Advice, for example, purports to “Compare SIP Trunk Providers,” but instead delivers a list of hosted VoIP solutions.  Certainly SIP may be leveraged by these hosted PBX solutions, but for people who want a SIP trunking solution to use with an on-premises PBX this can make looking for reviews frustrating.

Paid Placement and Lead Generation

Not to pick on Software Advice, but …  their site is a good example of lead generation disguised as reviews.  Click the price button next to any entry and you won’t be given a price or even an idea of their price relative to the others.  Instead, you’ll be presented with a lead form.  You can see reviews, but we noticed something suspicious.  The first entry is for Vontage (a hosted VoIP solution and not a SIP trunking provider, by the way), they have 0 reviews. We wonder how they made the top of the list as the most often recommended provider? None of this is unique to Software Advice.  There are many other very similar sites.

So, until there is a “Yelp” for reviews of sip trunking providers, you’ll need to do a bit of due diligence when looking for a vendor. Be sure to ask for customer testimonials from businesses with needs similar to your own. Nothing is as effective as a free trial at making sure you’ll be satisfied with the quality and performance of the solution. It’s also a good idea to make sure that the vendor doesn’t lock you into any long term contracts so that you can make a change if something goes wrong. Finally, if you do love your SIP solution, please get out there and tell people all about it.