Bring your own carrier (BYOC): What it means and why it matters in 2025

Scalability, cost control, channel flexibility, and seamless real-time customer interactions – there’s no shortage of reasons to consider a cloud-based unified communications (UC) platform.

But there’s a catch: Many such platforms offer baked-in voice services that aren’t their main priority. Oftentimes, these telephony services might not be as cost-effective as using an existing carrier contract. Just as often, the services might not meet your needs in terms of global coverage, reliability, and control.

UC providers have listened, and now many of them offer a solution where you can bring third-party carriers into their clouds. It’s called BYOC – bring your own carrier.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the BYOC model, its advantages and challenges, and what to consider before deciding whether BYOC is a good option for your organization.

When migrating their on-prem UC stack into the cloud, one of the biggest challenges for businesses is to find a UC platform with voice carrier services that meet their needs. This is especially true in the UCaaS (unified communications as a service) field.

For enterprises that look for global coverage and reliability, the UCaaS provider’s built-in voice solution is often not enough.

That’s where BYOC comes in.

With the bring your own carrier approach, your company gets to choose the voice carrier you want to bring into the UC platform. It’s something many UC providers like Microsoft Teams or Cisco Webex offer customers to make it more convenient for businesses to connect their cloud platform to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

These third-party voice carriers must meet certain standards set by the cloud vendor to make sure that third-party voice services and cloud features are compatible.

The BYOC method comes with several advantages.

Let’s look at some of the main benefits of the bring your own carrier approach.

With BYOC, your enterprise can retain everything you like about your existing carrier service while still benefiting from all the other advantages of a cloud-based communications platform.

You also get to keep all the features you’ve grown accustomed to, such as call forwarding and conference recording.

If you’re looking to switch carriers or need a new voice provider for your cloud environment, you’re also not bound to the baked-in solution, but can shop around for the provider that works best for you.

BYOC often results in net cost savings. You can keep your current contracts in place or negotiate favorable terms and rates with new carriers if you choose to switch.

You’ll also be able to keep your billing separately, which gives you a better cost overview and lets you stay in control of your communication services and technology.

Insufficient coverage and service interruptions are big concerns if you want to ensure essential voice services.

With the flexibility of BYOC, you can easily choose a reliable voice carrier with an extensive and redundant network that covers your local and global voice needs without having to worry about dropped calls or latency.

If your enterprise has an on-prem private branch exchange (PBX) that you would like to keep but still connect it to your cloud-based communication tools, you can go with a hybrid approach.

In that case, all you need is a trustworthy SIP trunk provider that can connect your on-prem setup with the cloud platform, and you get the best of both worlds.

If the benefits of BYOC sound like what your company is looking for, it probably is the right fit. But, as with anything, there are some challenges that come when you bring your own carrier.

First, setting up and configuring your platform with a third-party carrier can be cumbersome and costly, and often businesses are left alone to handle the planning, configuration, and setup. Especially if you don’t have any in-house expertise, that can be a problem.

Second, if there are any voice service issues down the line, your IT department might have to figure out the problem on its own.

When going BYOC, look for a carrier that offers expertise and hands-on help – not only for the initial setup, but also for ongoing support for issues with inbound and outbound calls.

Sinch, for example, has decades of experience with voice services. As a trusted BYOC partner, we offer our customers dedicated support throughout. And with our owned and operated voice network, we not only guarantee 99.999% uptime and 43 fully geo-redundant interconnections, we can also quickly identify issues and resolve them faster.

If your company doesn’t have a hybrid setup with a legacy on-prem PBX system, doesn’t want or need to keep an existing carrier contract, and has very basic voice service needs, using the calling plan of your cloud provider, will probably work for you.

On the other hand, BYOC is a better option for companies that have well-established, favorable, or complex relationships and contracts with their existing carriers and who don’t want to be forced to abandon it just to benefit from cloud-based communication services.

BYOC is also a great choice for any company that’s looking for reliability and coverage in voice services beyond what the cloud platform plan can offer.

Many ways lead into the cloud – and Sinch is here to support you whichever path you choose.

If you’re leaning towards keeping your on-prem UC system in place, we offer flexible and reliable SIP trunking services to connect you to your other cloud communication services.

If you think BYOC is right for you, Sinch can help as well. We’re listed as a trusted Operator Connect partner for Microsoft Teams as well as for Cisco Webex Cloud Connect where we guarantee affordable and high-quality voice services, with all the features you and your customers need – right within the UCaaS environment!

And if you’re looking for a one-stop-shop UCaaS platform that supports first-class voice and messaging capabilities – you’ve guessed it – Sinch has got you covered as well.

Ready to take the next step? Reach out to our team to discuss the best approach for your business.

Author: Marinela Potor Marinela Potor is a Senior Content Marketing Manager at Sinch. With a background in tech journalism, she specializes in messaging and AI.