Most businesses don’t play by the bundled rules anymore, but some are still bending to the limits of their communications platforms. If you’re one of those stuck inside a rigid ecosystem, there’s a better path—one that unlocks flexibility and scalability in your telephony, no matter your company size or comms stack.
Pennymac, DocuSign, and ibex have taken this Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) route, and they’ve proven it works. In fact, more than 50% of surveyed enterprises adopted BYOC in 2025, with another 19% planning to follow.
What is BYOC?
BYOC means choosing your own telecom provider for voice, messaging, and emergency services instead of defaulting to the built-in calling plans within UCaaS or CCaaS.
Major vendors offer programs that connect your SIP services to your cloud communications platform, such as Microsoft Teams’ Direct Routing and Operator Connect, Webex Calling’s Cloud Connect and Local Gateway, and Zoom Phone’s Carrier Exchange.
With BYOC, you can retain your current carrier configuration, including existing contracts, dial plans, calling features, and SBCs.
Why are more businesses embracing BYOC?
1. Total control over cloud-based communications
Rather than let standard calling plans dictate your PSTN connectivity, BYOC allows you to order and port numbers, configure SIP trunks, set up and manage failover, and make adjustments alongside your preferred provider. This simplifies enterprise cloud migrations, whether you’re going full cloud or hybrid.
Pennymac, one of the country’s largest mortgage lenders, partnered with Bandwidth in 2012 to move from on‑prem to hybrid and unify its enterprise telephony in one place with BYOC. They connected their UCaaS and CCaaS platforms to Bandwidth using shared SIP trunks, routing both inbound and outbound calls through the same connection. They’re also able to tweak SIP headers, access real-time data, and automate nearly everything through Bandwidth’s app and APIs.
For a company handling 2 million+ calls each month, granular control is necessary to ensure resilient, high-quality enterprise voice communications.
2. Reduced enterprise communications costs
When you unbundle enterprise telephony and work with your own carrier, you avoid inflated per-seat or per-user fees and only pay for what you use.
Pennymac saw firsthand how removing the middleman markup pays off. “Having a direct relationship with Bandwidth and consolidating all of our communication services with them has allowed us to save at least 50% on communication costs. This is compared to an alternative of enlisting those services separately through the platform or PBX provider,” says Gennadiy Karasev, EVP of Technology Infrastructure.
At ibex, a global BPO serving industries across North and Central America, Southeast Asia, and the Gulf, cost savings were also a big driver for pursuing cloud-based communications. They had been with “one of the best technology providers, but it came with a hefty invoice, which actually affects the cost of doing business,” explains Mohammad Hamid, Senior Manager of Telecommunications. Moving to a cloud communications platform and relying on BYOC with Bandwidth helped them cut costs while providing better rates to customers and better returns for shareholders.
3. Going global, minus the guesswork
If you’re doing business in multiple regions or opening new locations, BYOC helps you reach everywhere your employees and customers are based.
Take ibex, for example. With 175 million customer interactions handled across 30+ offices, they required an enterprise communications architecture that could keep up. “The goal of my department is to acquire the best telecommunication services from different providers all over the globe, wherever we are located and wherever we are expanding to,” says Hamid.
The BYOC model gave them a simpler way to get the coverage they needed without getting tangled up in a complex web of regional carriers. This is possible when your enterprise voice communications provider has a global footprint spanning over 90% of the world’s economy, like Bandwidth.
“Bandwidth offers us the diversity of expanding our business into different regions,” notes Hamid. “We can get any number from anywhere in the world. We can get anywhere with the help of Bandwidth.”
4. Faster enterprise telephony fixes
Support chains slow you down. A direct line to your carrier, on the other hand, puts you just a call or email away from solving problems before they affect operations.
For Docusign, the go-to for digital agreement management in 25+ countries, going straight to the source sped things up when they moved to Genesys and consolidated carriers. While other providers quoted lead times of 45-90 days, Bandwidth’s BYOC solution for Genesys delivered a working integration in under a day.
As Vipin Kalra, Lead Engineer, shares, “I still recall my first meeting with the Bandwidth team. And in the next 45 minutes, my lines were really hot. Integration done with Bandwidth platform, and we are not going back to any of those carriers ever again.” Since then, Docusign’s issue detection time has dropped to just 10% or less of what it was. That speed and access are advantageous in a company where “every minute loss of productivity is a loss of dollar revenue for us and our CSAT score.”
Meanwhile, ibex also received support not just during the initial proof of concept and successful enterprise cloud migration, but long after the ink dried. They got tickets answered in minutes, with logs and analysis to back it up. “Normally, when you choose a carrier and go with their services, the initial POC and the setup phase are good. Then later on, we get laid-back support from our service providers, which is not the case with Bandwidth,” says Hamid. Plus, detailed self-guided documentation is available whenever they need to troubleshoot on their own.
Bring power back to your platform with BYOC
You want better experiences for your customers and agents. But when your cloud-based communications are boxed in by a bundled platform, these experiences can easily turn from delightful to dreadful. Want to find out how BYOC can give you a way out (and why Bandwidth is the go-to BYOC partner for enterprises)? Talk to a BYOC expert about your options.
