A Sessiion Border Controller (SBC) is something you used to potentially need depending on your PBX.
Over the last ten years, the acronym SBC has been popularized by companies selling products to telephone carriers, but the functionality is simply that of a SIP back-to-back user agent (B2BUA) configured as a VoIP gateway. SBC gets in the middle of calls between two networks. For large enterprises that are not using cloud hosted solutions and need the functionality a SBC provides, the logical trend seems to be to move the functionality to the routers, doing away with the SBC altogether. In addition, Cisco offers integrated SBCs. Basically, SBCs are typically located at the same demarcation point as routers/firewalls, so integration seems like a sensible approach to reduce the number of parts to buy and operate.
Our position is that because Intulse is a cloud hosted solution you do not need an SBC, in fact, we recommend that you do NOT have a SBC. Furthermore, if you have similar technology built-in to your routers that you disable it as well. We believe SBCs disrupt true peer-to-peer networking. They get in the way of end points talking to each other directly, adding a “hop” for the media to go through and potentially degrading performance. In some instances, they can prevent end-to-end encryption from being used.
Rev. Oct 19, 2016