Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC)

What is BYOC?

BYOC (Bring Your Own Carrier) refers to programs that give you the ability to choose a carrier that best fits your business needs, and in turn, plug them into your unified communications or contact center platforms.

The primary driver behind the growing demand for BYOC programs is the migration from on-prem telecom to cloud-based deployments. By moving away from on-prem and converting traffic to SIP, you will gain more flexibility, scalability, and control over your telephony solutions.

BYOC has multiple definitions which are largely dependent upon the context. For example, BYOC was a thing even before it absorbed an acronym. Legacy UC (unified communication) and contact center platforms were deployed with physical equipment where there was a natural expectation that organizations would plug in their service providers.

Now, with the rise in popularity of cloud-based communication platforms, the need for organizations to bring carriers with them has been wrapped with programs and solutions known as BYOC (or Direct Routing in Microsoft’s case).

The benefits of BYOC

The industry generally refers to BYOC when a customer is using a 3rd party routing platform or switch (XaaS, Hosted/Cloud Voice) but instead of also using that 3rd party’s telephony options, you contract with, bill, and manage voice services directly with a carrier like Bandwidth. Why would you want to do this?

Sometimes you choose BYOC because the 3rd party platform doesn’t offer the coverage or specific services your business needs, or maybe you get really good rates. That being said, sometimes you wouldn’t go the BYOC route because buying the bundled platform + telephony from the XaaS provider makes more sense. Either way, there are three major benefits to the BYOC model:

1. Flexibility. If you use the 3rd party’s services then you won’t have direct control over telephony. With BYOC, you order and port numbers, set up SIP trunks, provision and manage failover, and implement most changes, directly with your telephony provider of choice. If you don’t like that carrier and want to utilize someone else, go for it, it’s YOUR relationship to manage.

2. Insight. Every time you need to order, change or disconnect services you’re once removed from the carrier that’s responsible for completing those tasks out which can add time and complexity. Working directly with the carrier allows you to go directly to the source for insights and telephony needs instead of working with a 3rd party as a go-between. And, if there’s ever an issue with your telephony, instead of having to file a ticket with your 3rd party platform, who will then file one with the carrier, you can work directly with your carrier to resolve the issue faster, ensuring less downtime that can impact your bottom line.

3. Costs. Businesses are in business to make money. Nothing wrong with that. But why pay more for telephony services through a 3rd party when you have the expertise to manage it yourself? You’ve already invested in people, infrastructure, and processes to serve your customers so take advantage of direct-to-carrier pricing and cut out the middleman mark-up.

Take control of your telephony with BYOC

Bring Your Own Carrier may not always be the right solution. For customers that can’t or don’t want to take on the responsibility of implementing and managing telephony, the bundled solutions many UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS and Hosted Voice providers offer may be ideal. Those one-stop-shop solutions offer the easy button that many customers find attractive. We at Bandwidth are fans of this model as well since we power the telephony behind many of those platforms.

But if you do have the expertise and you want to take advantage of the aforementioned benefits, Bandwidth has multiple options to integrate into many 3rd party platforms. With our owned and operated all-IP Tier 1 global voice network, local number coverage, 5x redundant toll-free solutions, robust self-servicing options in the Bandwidth Dashboard, and our white-glove customer support, customers can save time, money, and hassle by going direct to the carrier and taking control of their telephony.

Learn more about Bandwidth’s BYOC programs

Bandwidth owns and operates one of the largest all-IP voice networks in the nation. On top of that network, we have built a full suite of APIs to give our customers the power to communicate, and now, the power of choice. Today, you can choose Bandwidth as your carrier of choice and we’ll give you the APIs and tools you need to compose call-flows and orchestrate migrations – and more – that will make your business thrive.

Since Bandwidth is a true cloud-native carrier, our solution works in both a hybrid environment as well as a full cloud deployment.