Ana Castrillon 
Mae Emuslan has been at Toku for four years when she first started off as our NOC Engineer, and evolved into her present role as a Voice Engineer. As Toku turns four, she reflects on how the company’s diversity has helped her team achieve new highs.
Have you ever been to a restaurant with a BYOB policy?
BYOB, if you’re not familiar with the term, stands for Bring Your Own Booze. It’s a neat idea that allows people to enjoy some good restaurant food with the flexibility to bring alcohol that they want to drink – ideal for wine connoisseurs or home-brewed beer lovers.
It can also work out well for the restaurant as they don’t have to apply and pay for alcohol licensing or pay for the upkeep and staffing of a bar.
Interestingly, a similar trend has emerged in the business world. For instance, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a popular workplace initiative that encourages staff to use their own technology devices in the office.
The COVID pandemic has sparked a growth in BYO strategies due to the accelerated transition to the cloud. Companies are keen to “bring their own” tools and applications to cloud-based platforms and ecosystems, without making any sacrifice in quality due to the integration.
So, what’s the hype?
Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) is a concept that has been around for a while that describes the trend for businesses to explore cloud communications, while still keeping telephony capabilities that they’ve been traditionally using. It may involve either keeping their existing SIP trunking provider or moving from a traditional PSTN to SIP trunking.
It’s not surprising that the trend for BYOC is growing when you consider that 42% of businesses have accelerated cloud and unified communication adoption over the past year.
Since 2018, the proportion of organisations that use UCaaS has grown from 11% to 34%. To meet the demand, more and more CPaaS, UCaaS, and CCaaS platforms are setting up their software to enable the BYOC model.
What are the benefits of BYOC?
Save money
The main benefit of BYOC is that it provides a way for businesses to control operational and telephone network access costs. Bundled packages that include cloud services, as well as PSTN access, tend to run at a higher cost than keeping them separate and using a BYOC approach. With BYOC, it is also much cheaper to scale up your operations as independent SIP trunking providers tend to offer more flexible pricing plans and deals to add more users.
Quality of calls
There is a noticeable difference in quality between a network provider that is close to the source, compared to one that aggregates traffic over a long distance. BYOC allows companies to choose the former and offer an improved service to their customers and staff.
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Greater control over call routing
Call routing is an important consideration for many businesses, especially those that have their own call centre or large companies with many departments. BYOC enables businesses to set up call routing through their cloud communications provider which means they get better control over it and improved call quality. Being able to control your call routing and other features, means that you can stay compliant with regulations in various countries and markets.
Regulatory compliance
Data security and privacy are critical for most businesses these days, especially due to growing regulatory oversight. Bringing your own carrier means you can make sure that the SIP trunking provider can provide local compliance and meet with local regulations around telcos.
Bring your phone numbers (number porting)
Being able to keep hold of the same telephone numbers and extensions is a big selling point for many businesses, as it means that they don’t need to update all their marketing materials, letterheads, and contact pages.
Automatic configuration with communications APIs
BYOC allows businesses to integrate their telephony, along with all their existing features, into a digital cloud-based platform without too much hassle. An API can be used to seamlessly integrate everything without any hardware changes or the need for new network infrastructure.
Greater flexibility across the business
For companies that are spread across multiple sites, BYOC allows them to use one global provider or multiple providers depending on the location. In other words, they can find the best SIP trunking provider in a certain area or find providers that meet the demands of each particular site, regions such as APAC for instance.
Does it make sense for you to BYOC?
BYOC is the right choice for many businesses. In fact, any business that wants to benefit from lower operational costs, higher quality, and the convenience of a seamless unified communication integration would do well to bring their own carrier.
However, certain businesses will feel the advantages of BYOC even more than others. Large enterprises that have a sophisticated, highly complex communications stack will benefit the most. This is due to the fact that they need to find the best application and provider for each layer of the communication stack: the telco layer, the UCaaS, CPaaS, and CCaaS.
In other words, medium to large-sized companies need greater flexibility in their cloud-based unified communications systems and BYOC gives them that.
Mae Emuslan 
