Cloud communications company Twilio Inc. has today announced the general availability of its Elastic SIP Trunking service, following a successful beta test that launched in November 2014.

The service is a cloud-based solution that provides connectivity for IP-based communications infrastructure to connect to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), for making and receiving telephone calls to the rest of the world via any broadband internet connection.

“Even though Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunking has been around for nearly two decades, 80 percent of the world’s enterprises are still using the technology that came before it..connecting voice over dedicated time-division multiplexed (TDM) lines.” Director of Product Marketing for Twilio Al Cook told SiliconANGLE prior to the official announcement. 

He went on to explain that while there are other SIP services out there, they are often slow and difficult to setup, whereas their new offering taps into Twilio’s current carrier support for a cloud-based solution.

“Elastic SIP Trunking takes our core carrier connectivity that we’ve spent years building and unbundled it from the rest of our product stack. You can provision a SIP trunk on demand, through the portal or the API, with inbound numbers in over 50 countries” Cook said. “Instead of months to deploy, it takes seconds. It uses our global cloud platform to dynamically connect your IP infrastructure to the closest of seven regions around the world, and from there selects the best carrier for connecting the call based on real-time quality measurements using metrics like jitter, latency and MOS score. The architecture is built with resiliency in mind at every level.”

Features of the service include transparent, pay as you go pricing with no capacity limits, secure connections whether over MPLS or TLS/SRTP (early access,) E.911 support for emergency service access (early access), and SIP Registration for extending connectivity to SIP phones (early access).

Numbers using the service can send and receive SMS and MMS, Data-Driven Routing that uses real-time quality measurements to dynamically route outbound calls to the best carrier, and one-click call recording, with no additional hardware or per-user fees — just a simple per-minute charge for cloud storage of the recording.

As we’ve covered recently here at SiliconANGLE, Twilio is doing some fascinating things in the space, particularly how it applies simple to use API’s in a cloud based scalable and affordable VOIP offering that is being used by companies including Uber Inc., AirBnB Inc., OpenTable Inc., Box Inc., Home Depot Inc., eHarmony Inc., The Coca-Cola Company, and many more.

Twilio was reported February 20th to be considering an IPO, but was “in no rush.”

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