If you’ve got multiple phone carriers (operators) supplying your phone numbers or calling minutes, it’s now possible to connect them both to Microsoft Teams.
That means if you have BT for your UK numbers and AT&T for your US numbers, you can add them both as your underlying calling platform while using Teams as the interface for calls, chats, and meetings.
Users won’t know any different. They’ll continue to use the native Teams app. Under the hood, you’ll benefit from discounted minutes you’ve agreed prior and migrate over any routing and pre-configurations.
There’s no longer a reason not to connect multiple carriers to Microsoft Teams.
First up, why use existing carriers to power your calling?
You’ve probably got enough reasons yourself.
They might include:
- Pressure from procurement
- Pressure from IT
- Long legacy PBX contracts
- Geographical areas unsupported by Microsoft
- A wider digital transformation program
But, if not, and the decision is down to you, consider bringing your own carrier to use as your calling provider inside Teams for these reasons:
- Potential cost savings: paying retail or creating workarounds is never cost-effective.
- Flexibility per site: scale as and when you need to.
- Control per site: total access and visibility of calls and costs.
- Simple number management: make changes on the fly.
- Emergency services access: simple and compliant configuration.
- Integration options: like contact center and CRM.
- Redundancy: what if Teams goes down? A solid disaster recovery plan must include multiple platforms for making and receiving calls.
It all begins to add up, doesn’t it? It’s easy to see why BYOC for Microsoft Teams is not just a blue-sky requirement, but almost a must-have for the modern communications stack.
Isn’t native Teams Calling easier?
The answer is “Yes, if”.
That depends on several things:
- You need to activate new users quickly
- You only have very basic calling requirements
- You don’t plan to scale to a larger number of users
- You don’t have multiple regions (that are unsupported by Microsoft)
It’s possible to port your existing numbers to Microsoft. Microsoft is a genuine telecoms provider, so the process is the same as porting to any carrier.
Businesses love Calling Plans because they’re quick and easy to buy – and quick and easy to use.
But, when you need advanced call routing, integrations to other phone systems, and global scaling, using Calling Plans becomes impossible.
Isn’t native Teams Calling cheaper?
You’d think so, wouldn’t you?
With everything Microsoft, it makes sense that you benefit from cost savings. But there are a lot of instances where you’re going to be paying for Calling Plan minutes that go unused.
Think about it…
You license every user with Teams Phone and Calling Plan. That costs $9.90 per user per month. If you have 2,000 users, that’s $19,800 per year.
Now think about this…
How many of those users actually make anywhere near the number of calls they get minutes for?
In fact, how many make any external calls at all?
Research by Nermertes indicates between 50% and 75% of available minutes get used by Calling Plan customers, leaving unused minutes and creating a chasm between cost and value.
When deploying Teams Phone at scale, 50% of 2,000 users, for example, is a large cost gap that looks extremely unappealing on financial reports. Especially, when there’s a more cost-effective alternative.
How to connect multiple carriers to Microsoft Teams
The first thing you need to do is set up your Callroute instance.
This is going to be your single pane of glass for Teams Phone management in the future.
Once set up you’re able to access our carrier connectivity library. From there, you can choose your carrier from the list and connect Callroute to your carrier.
Don’t worry if your carrier isn’t in the list we’re able to add your carrier to our platform with ease.
Once added, you can load in your phone numbers either using our simple user interface, or if you have a large number of numbers, upload them in bulk using our CSV import tool.
Then connect Callroute to your Teams tenant using our automated Direct Routing deployment which requires only your admin service account, then set your default route, and you’re ready to switch over.
To switch over to Callroute, login to your carrier’s customer portal and change your SIP trunk routing from your current selection to Callroute. If you don’t have access to a portal, contact your carrier to make this change for you.
Once completed, incoming calls will be routed to Callroute and into Microsoft Teams.
To change your user’s outbound call route, you’ll need to change their online voice routing policy in Teams to point to Callroute.
Don’t worry, we make this extremely easy to do from the Callroute portal using personas.
Our default persona contains all the settings you need to make the routing change out of the box. All you need to do is assign it to your users and we will make the Teams policy changes for you.
If you have hundreds of users, this can be done in bulk automatically by creating a simple auto-provisioning rule that you can trigger when you’re ready to perform the bulk migration.
Adding more carriers to Callroute is easy, simply follow the same process of connecting Callroute to your carrier and importing your numbers.
There is no need to deploy additional Direct Routing configuration for each carrier. Callroute is your single connectivity point for Teams Direct Routing. We do the routing logic that ensures your calls are routed out to your appropriate carrier depending on the number being used.
There are a number of benefits when using Callroute rather than connecting your carriers to Teams directly.
- It simplifies your Teams Phone tenant configuration.
- It makes provisioning Teams Phone simple and the same process for every user no matter what country or carrier service they need.
- It’s easy to consolidate or add more carriers into your service offering without needing to rearchitect, update documentation, or train support staff on the new service.
- You’re able to connect other phone systems, contact centers, and SIP devices to Callroute, in addition to Teams allowing you to share carriers and numbers with. them rather than purchasing additional SIP trunk services from your carrier.
- Connecting all your phone systems, carriers, and teams together in the cloud enables tight integration. So, when it’s time to move users from one system to another, you can without having to worry about porting numbers or changing them.
Ready to connect all your carriers to Teams?
