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What "Bring Your Own Trunk" Actually Changes

BYOT is usually sold as a discount. The more interesting effects are on lock-in, routing control and what happens when you want to leave.

The Neo Dialer teamAugust 5, 20266 min read

Bring-your-own-trunk is usually pitched as a saving. It often is one — but the size depends entirely on what you pay today, so anyone quoting you a percentage before seeing your rate card is guessing.

The effects worth understanding are structural.

The bundled model

A bundled dialer sells you software and minutes together. That is genuinely simpler: one invoice, one vendor, one support queue.

What comes with it:

  • Their carrier, their rate. You pay the vendor's marked-up per-minute price,

and you have no visibility into the margin.

  • Their numbers. Numbers provisioned through the vendor typically belong to

the vendor's carrier account.

  • A migration project to leave. Because the numbers move too.

That last point is the one that matters. The switching cost is not the dialer — it is renumbering, and telling every customer who has your old number.

The BYOT model

You hold the carrier relationship. Neo Dialer connects to the trunk you already have.

  • Your rate stays your rate. Whatever you negotiated is what you pay. We

charge for the dialer.

  • Your numbers stay yours. They live in your carrier account. Changing dialer

does not touch them.

  • You control routing. Multiple trunks per tenant, selected per campaign —

so a different carrier for a different region, or a failover trunk, is a configuration change rather than a migration.

What it costs you

Honesty requires the other column:

  • You manage a carrier relationship. Registration, IP allowlists, rate

negotiation, and a second support queue when something breaks.

  • Two invoices.
  • Two places to look when a call fails. Though in practice this is less bad

than it sounds: our routing log tells you within seconds whether the call reached us, which narrows it to one side immediately.

If you have never held a carrier account and do not want to, platform-provided trunks exist. The point of BYOT is that it is your choice rather than the vendor's.

How the connection works

Trunks are provisioned into Asterisk through PJSIP realtime the moment you save them — no deploy step, no support ticket. Registration or IP authentication, both supported.

Where a deployment runs across several media servers, the trunk endpoint is created on each enabled server, and outbound calls resolve to the endpoint on whichever server is handling the call. You do not have to think about this, but it is why "which server handled the call" is a question our support will sometimes ask you.

Any carrier

There is no allowlist. Telnyx, Twilio, Bandwidth, Vonage, SignalWire and Plivo are all in use, and anything speaking standard SIP will work. If a provider's portal uses unfamiliar terminology, send us a screenshot and we will map it across.

SIP trunk setup, step by step.

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