Zoom Releases SIP-Connected Audio & Other New Audio Features

Zoom is excited to announce improved support for SIP-connected audio. SIP-connected audio is a highly cost-effective solution for enabling telephone users to participate in Zoom meetings and can directly help enterprises reduce or optimize their audio spend. It is intended for our larger customers that have a significant on-premise IP telephony deployment and do more than a million minutes of conferencing every month.

With SIP-connected audio, we establish a SIP trunk (a network connection specifically designed to make and deliver phone calls) over a direct and private connection between the customer’s network and the Zoom cloud. Meeting participants that dial into a meeting or have the meeting call them, and are “on net” from the perspective of the customers IP telephony network, will be connected over this trunk rather than over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN aka phone lines). This connection is secure and reliable, and saves money compared to PSTN rates and fees. Zoom is very flexible in our support for SIP-connected audio. We can easily combine SIP-connected audio with Zoom PSTN dial-in and call-out services in order to cover all your phone users around the globe. Now Zoom can intelligently control which calls will traverse the SIP trunk, and can support call-out to internal extension-only phones. For example, you can designate that calls to and from specific countries go over the SIP trunk. And because we are standards based, we are not prescriptive about what brand of communications manager or border elements are used in the customer’s network, or which telecommunications vendor the customer may choose for establishing the direct connection between our network and yours. This feature is available as part of our Enhanced Audio plan.

Zoom is also happy to announce two more features that are useful for our customers that choose to use the phone for audio when joining meetings. First, we’ve made it even easier to join and start meetings when you’re a phone-only user. You can now create meetings that allow hosts and attendees to start and join from their phone only (ie: you don’t need to have anyone join from the Zoom client/app). This feature is free to all customers. You can learn more about the join by phone-only feature in this article. We’ve also added some back-end intelligence to help you avoid accidentally getting a voicemail added to the meeting. Basically, when you call-out to someone’s phone to join a meeting, Zoom will automatically require that person to press 1 before entering the meeting if it take it takes them too long, or too short, a time to answer (indicating that you’ve been sent to voicemail). If SIP-connected audio or the other new audio features may be right for your company, sign up for a personalized 1-1 demo with a Zoom product specialist.